Common Ground Theatre and St. Paul’s Cathedral offer Gian Carlo Menotti’s brief, haunting and gemlike opera “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” originally commissioned as a 1951 television special. The hourlong piece is staged by artistic director Floyd Gaffney and boasts two especially lovely performances, those of soprano Noelle Tetrick as Mother and boy soprano Spike Sommers as Amahl, her crippled son.
The cupboard is bare. The fireplace is cold. Amahl used to be a shepherd, but his mother was forced to sell the sheep, one by one. They once had a goat, which gave warm, sweet milk to the dreamy, imaginative lad, who is prone to playing his pipes under the night sky. When Amahl tells Mother of an immense Star, she refuses to believe him or to go to the window to see for herself. When the three Wise Men (Tom Oberjat as Kaspar, Joe Pettigrew as Melchior, and Arthur Wheatfall as Balthazar) arrive, they cannot be denied, but she finds it unfathomable that they take gifts and gold to a Child they’ve never seen, while her beloved son is starving.
Menotti’s music and through-sung dialogue are perfectly wed. One forgets how wrenching, inspiring and redemptive the tale can be.
A veteran of Starlight Musicals and a fifth-grader at the Children’s Creative and Performing Arts Academy, Sommers is a senior chorister with St. Paul’s Cathedral Choristers. A beautiful young woman, Tetrick is gifted with a voice of rich quality.
Handsome Carl Hebert provides an inscrutable plus as the Page, and as always, Oberjat is in character and textually on the money. Joan Wong’s costumes are impressive, and the excellent Janie Prim provides piano accompaniment. Michael Morgan conducts.
The Cathedral’s Great Hall (now called the Center for Performing and Visual Art) is kind to small voices such as Sommers’s. Larger and complex sounds, especially that of the chorus of peasants, tend to blur text and pitch against the walls and high ceilings, creating overtones and reverberations that are problematic for singers and listeners alike. However, the opportunity to hear Menotti’s great work and to revel in its simple message is rare, and such built-in drawbacks should not deter one’s attendance.
A group of young people surrounded me and they seemed utterly captivated. The experience is one that can be enjoyed by the entire family.
Four performances remain: 8 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 14 through Saturday, Dec. 16, and 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 17. Suggested donation for general seating is $25 (adults) and $18 (students, seniors, military).
St. Paul’s Cathedral is located at 2728 6th Ave. Reserve space by calling (619) 263-7911 or e-mailing [email protected].