Intimacy makes Tchaikovsky's opera shine

Climbing out of COVID was hard enough for Skylark Opera Theatre without losing its imaginative artistic director, Bob Neu, to the Utah Symphony and Opera. But its coming-out party was nevertheless set for spring, with a chamber adaptation of Peter Tchaikovsky's opera "Eugene Onegin."

Based on a novel in verse by consummate Russian romantic Alexander Pushkin, it would be performed in the main gallery of the Museum of Russian Art — a grand celebration of the richness of Russian culture.

If Russia's invasion of Ukraine presented marketing challenges, Skylark isn't feeling it at the box office, judging from a virtually sold-out opening weekend. Opera lovers are hungry for live performance, and audiences are savvy enough to know the war has little to do with Pushkin or Tchaikovsky.

And what a rewarding production those audiences are experiencing. Under the direction of Skylark's interim artistic director, Gary Briggle, an opera associated with opulence in both score and scenery is reduced to its essentials while doing away with the distance between performers and audience.

That takes a cast comfortable with the vulnerability of working without an emotional safety net, and Skylark has that. They're also uniformly excellent singers, bringing a tender touch to Tchaikovsky's music not possible in big opera houses.

If you think Tchaikovsky's strong suit is his sweeping orchestrations, it's hard to argue with that. But pianist and music director Carson Rose Schneider brings out the beauty skillfully as the production's lone instrumentalist. Even the dance interludes — which feature the opera's most familiar music — capably capture the music's ebullient spirit, the cast swirling about dreamily in Heidi Spesard-Noble's choreographic hybrids of ballroom and folk dance.

While Pushkin's novel centers upon its bored loner of a title character, Tchaikovsky and co-librettist Konstantin Shilovsky chose to focus on the episodes involving Onegin's rural neighbors. One is his poet friend, Lenski, who introduces him to his fiancée and her sister, Tatyana, who falls hard for Onegin at first acquaintance. She pursues him, he rejects her, and jealousy cuts a destructive swath through the lives of all.

Stabile's second-scene tour de force is deeply involving, as is tenor Benjamin Dutcher's moving take on Lenski's sad soliloquy, which opens the production's second half. As his fiancée Olga, Melanie Ashkar is equally invested in the emotional intimacy.

While baritone Eric Smedsrud does some fine things with Onegin, especially vocally, he isn't able to plumb up the character's charm, his aloofness and eventual loutishness keeping the audience at an emotional distance that doesn't suit the staging.

While some quartets are too clustered to understand — even though the opera is sung in English — it's a very involving production, aided by the well executed lighting design of Mike Kittel and Karin Olson and costuming courtesy of the Utah Symphony and Opera. So it looks like Neu is sending more than positive energy from out West.

Skylark Opera Theatre's 'Eugene Onegin'

Where: The Museum of Russian Art, 5500 Stevens Av. S., Mpls.