Arts & Events

La Traviata at Festival Opera: Festival Opera, with Michael Morgan as artistic and music director, stages opera in a way that the original meaning of the word becomes apparent. Each artistic element of the production has its own place, accompanies the rest on an equal footing: singing, orchestration, acting, set, spectacle. And with this production of Traviata, dance reassumes its importance in operatic spectacle as well. Mark Foehringer, who has excellently stage directed the show, is a splendid ballet choreographer; the dancers from his Mark Foehringer Dance Project in San Francisco tear up Flora's party in Act II with wonderful gypsy and toreador numbers. And a brief, masked Carnival rout outside the window of the dying Violetta--with an early winter morning Paris dimly glowing--shows the influence of the director's years in Sao Paulo.  

From Peter Crompton's set design, Mark Antaky's lighting, Denise Gutierrez's costuming to the performances of local singers in the supporting roles--like a spirited Igor Vieira as the Marquis--to the crucial characterization of Germont, the father who comes to convince the former courtesan to leave his young son, played and sung splendidly by Nicolai Janitzky, it's a glorious production, which both reveals the bare form of the now-classic opera and illuminates it with beautiful interpretation, more than mere ornament. But the evening belongs most of all to Rebecca Davis, whose Violetta is wholly her own, both as sung and acted, a stunning rendition of one of the greatest soprano roles in the medium. 

This weekend only, July 15 and 17, Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek. festivalopera.org 

And from August 6 to 14, Frank Loesser's operatic musical, The Most Happy Fella, based on They Knew What They Wanted (Sidney Howard's play and the Garson Kanin movie with Charles Laughton and Carole Lombard), set in the Napa Valley of yore. 

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Woman's Will, the East Bay's all-female Shakespeare company, will stage their late 60s Midsummer Night's Dream--the Far-Out Bard?--at 2 p. m. on the 16th in Live Oak Park in Berkeley (where they'll return on the 31st and August 6, after playing Dimond Park in Oakland on the 22 & 23, same time). Victoria Erville, artistic director, said the show would be staged simply, outdoors, and is about "magic, love and family--the family we're born into, and the family we create." womanswill.org 

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Woodminster Summer Musicals goes into the last weekend for Oliver! this Thursday through Sunday at 8, at the magnificent old WPA amphitheater in Joaquin Miller Park, high over Oakland & the Bay. woodminster.com