West Bay Opera wraps season with magical operetta West Bay Opera wraps season with magical operetta (May 30, 2003)

Songs of 'La Perichole' resonate

By Mort Levine

Be warned. If you go to one of this weekend's performances of the Jacques Offenbach masterpiece "La Perichole," the songs will stay in your head for days. It has dozens of the catchiest, most singable tunes you'll encounter on any musical stage, and when fine trained operatic voices handle the assignment the experience is one that will linger with you.

West Bay Opera could not have chosen a better vehicle than reviving this 1868 hit of the Paris Opera Comique. They brought it to Palo Alto's Lucie Stern Theater for two weekends; the final performance is a matinee June 1. The company recruited a batch of alumni of Opera San Jose and provided a top-flight entertainment. It probably has to be called "light opera" because like light beer, it is silly, frothy, lusty and won't cause the same number of headaches the real stuff might give you.

The implausible but clever story -- set in colonial Peru -- involves a pair of penniless lovers, Perichole and Piquillo (sung by mezzo soprano Layna Chianakas and lyric tenor Brett Colby) who can't scrape up four pesos to fund a marriage license.

After her beauty catches the roving eye of a rather insecure viceroy (baritone Roberto Perlas Gomez), she takes up his offer to move into the palace as a "lady in waiting." But the rules require holders of that rank to be married women, so the viceroy's henchmen manage to find a suitable spouse in Piquillo by getting him tipsy.

When he sobers up, he thinks his fianc_e has betrayed him. But all ends happily as the viceroy forgives everyone and true love triumphs.

Offenbach wrote about a hundred musical theater offerings, but in the mid-1860s, in the reign of Napoleon III's Second Empire, he turned out his four great operettas: "La Vie Parisienne," "The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein," "La Belle Helene" and "La Perichole." This paved the way to compose his final and most performed work, "the Tales of Hoffman," which he never lived to see produced.

In choosing "Perichole," West Bay Opera revives a work which inspired the Vienese school of operetta headed by the younger Johann Strauss and the Gilbert and Sullivan team in England. Truly, Offenbach, the son of a German synagogue cantor, revolutionized popular opera going for mass audiences, with his catchy melodies and harmonies. The French opera bouffe has lasted to become a staple of stages throughout the world.

Conductor Barbara Day Turner and Stage Director Daniel Helfgott, both formerly of Opera San Jose, teamed up to bring the polish of a sure professionalism to seamlessly stitch the complex creation. They chose a vernacular translation by Donald Pippin for the English libretto and salted the spoken recitatives with a few topical references in the tradition of many performances in comic opera venues.

Chianakas' richly nuanced mezzo voice was perfect for the title role, which ranges through a contrasting set of moods. Her handling of the first act Letter aria was a dramatic highlight. Her swain, Brett Colby's high tenor, came off as a bit more characteristic of a Broadway musical. In the role of the good-hearted but slightly villainous Viceroy Don Andres, Perlas Gomez showed great bass-baritone range and a strong command as well as showing a comic side in his various disguises.

The 24-piece pit orchestra had fun with the full range of Spanish fandangos, sequidillas and boleros, along with the soulful waltzes, fast-paced gallops and march tunes under Maestra Turner's competent baton.

Among the supportive characters, West Bay veterans like Michael Morris and Mark Hernandez delivered solid comic turns as the mayor of Lima and the first gentleman of the bedchamber, respectively. Likewise, as a pair of drunken notaries always needed to preside over operatic weddings, Ken Malucelli and Erik Wenburg provided just the right amount of stumbling pratfalls.

The three cousins who run the tavern whence comes the liquidity to propel the action were sung ably by Heidi Moss, Amy Stalcup and Ariela Morgenstern in their West Bay debuts.

The next seasonbegins in October with an Opera Festival, followed by the "Barber of Seville" and "Don Giovanni." Not exactly blazing new trails in repertory but as West Bay's artistic director David Sloss told the audience before the opening performance, West Bay Opera will persevere despite economic hard times and drops in funding, thanks to its loyal opera patrons.