Review: Minnesota Opera’s successful ‘Elixir of Love’ delivers performances with power and panache

Beware the charismatic charlatan. If someone promises to deliver everything on your wish list, it’s probably too good to be true.

Such a character is Dulcamara in Gaetano Donizetti’s opera, “The Elixir of Love.” He might be the art form’s most brazen huckster, an itinerant salesman with a truck full of potions guaranteed to knock down every barrier between you and happiness. When his engine conks out at a California orange grove during World War I, he seizes the chance to turn his misfortune into fortune by unloading his dubious remedies on farm workers, collecting much of their take-home pay.

This is the setting for Minnesota Opera’s breezy and consistently enjoyable production of “The Elixir of Love.” Transporting in both lighting and set design, it’s a musical and theatrical success, the lead roles sung with power and panache, the orchestra and chorus bringing bright and balanced tones to Donizetti’s lively score.

With this production, Minnesota Opera is going where no major American opera company has gone before: The trade organization, Opera America, sponsors a biennial competition for directors and designers called the Robert L.B. Tobin Director-Designer Prize, for which a director and design team accept the challenge of formulating an interpretation within a month. For the first time in its 15-year history, one of the winning entries is being brought to the stage.

Director Daniel Ellis and his team decided to set their “Elixir” at the intersection of agriculture and advertising, taking for inspiration a 1916 ad campaign that’s said to have saved the California orange industry. Ad man Albert Lasker made almost as many promises as Dulcamara as to what orange juice could do. In Minnesota Opera’s version, squeeze a few oranges into some bad burgundy and, voila, you have a love potion.

That proves an attractive pitch for Nemorino, a farmhand who’s crazy about his boss, Adina, but can’t convince her to return his affections. Soon, he has a rival in a handsome army sergeant who thinks the world of himself and Nemorino’s desperation drives him to seek from Dulcamara the titular beverage.

The cast does invariably fine things with Donizetti’s marvelous music — sung in Italian with English supertitles — led by soprano Vanessa Becerra. She brings a welcome warmth to Adina, both in her lovely tone and in making her a fun-loving, approachable boss. Becerra’s high notes are pure and thrilling as they soar above the orchestra, which is kept in fine balance by Minnesota Opera’s new principal conductor, Christopher Franklin.

The opera’s most memorable aria comes when Nemorino is resigned to moving on, and tenor Andrew Stenson makes it captivating, infusing it with melancholy tenderness and sweet subtlety. Far more forthright and comical are the opera’s two chief baritones: Joseph Lattanzi is every inch the smarmy egotistical frat boy as Belcore, lending a beautiful voice to his spirited paeans to himself. And Stefano de Peppo brings a smile-inducing believability to the pattered promises of Dulcamara.

Director Ellis and his team inject some very funny stage business into their interpretation, all of it flying by at the kind of breakneck speed a silly rom-com requires. And this is indeed that, a comical concoction ideal for audiences of any operatic experience level. Believe me.

Minnesota Opera’s ‘The Elixir of Love’

When: 7:30 p.m. Thu. and Sat., 2 p.m. Sun.

Where: Ordway Music Theater, 345 Washington St., St. Paul

Tickets: $31-$250, 612-333-6669 or mnopera.org

Rob Hubbard is a Twin Cities classical music writer. Reach him at wordhub@yahoo.com.