West Edge Opera 2026

West Edge Opera's summer festival this year at Oakland's Scottish Rite Temple has been a great success overall, with the only disappointment being the opener, Benjamin Britten's 1954 The Turn of the Screw. I was looking forward to the production because Britten is a favorite composer and the soprano Laura Bohn, heading a strong cast as the Governess, is one of my favorite singing actresses in the world. However, the show didn't work for me on any level. (All production photos are by Cory Weaver.)

The main problem is that over three-quarters of the live action takes place behind scrims on which videos are projected along with the two singing ghosts transmitted from a makeshift video room high in the hall. This creates a severe distancing effect for the audience, and half the time it's difficult to even discern whats going on or where each of the 16 scenes are supposed to be taking place.

Henry James's 1898 novella is famously ambiguous as to whether the erotically insinuating ghosts are real or are the invention of a sexually repressed young Governess, or both. The Britten version leans in the direction of the ghosts being real, and before their deaths having corrupted the abandoned children Miles and Flora. However, the director went with the hysterical young Governess interpretation, which didn't make much sense. The Freudian interpretation of the hysterical woman inventing sexual crimes feels like an outdated cliche, particularly in our Epstein saturated moment. Additionally, most of the sensual vocal music in the astringent score is between the boy soprano Miles and the ghost of Peter Quint, seen above in a strong, convincingly creepy performance by tenor Alex Boyer. Britten was also a bit of a tortured pedophile himself, and you can hear that anguish in his music in everything from Peter Grimes to Curlew River.

The second opera of the festival, Handel's 1711 Rinaldo, was a wildly colorful palate cleanser. The narrative about Christian Crusaders tangling with Muslim Saracens was updated to comic-book superheroes battling archvillains by director and choreographer Keturah Stickann in a marvelous production that worked splendidly. The production also featured six dancing supernumeraries playing Cops and Villains, and they were unexpectedly delightful, deserving their own shoutout: Ellis Broderick, Eden Magana, Elena Martins, Devon Martinez y McFarland, Christopher Nachtra, and Max van der Sterre.

The bottomlessly deep voice of contralto Sara Couden was perfect for the bumbling police chief Goffredo and countertenor Kyle Tingzon as our superhero Rinaldo proved that his star turn as Oberon in Pocket Opera's A Midsummer Night's Dream earlier this year was no fluke. Best of all, the comic-book concept was played straight, without campy, wink-wink asides, even though there was plenty of humor involved, particularly in some of the colloquial supertitle translations ("This is freaking me out").

Villains usually have the juiciest roles in superhero tales, and baritone Efraín Solís as the evil Argante and soprano Nikki Einfeld as the sorceress Armida inhabited their parts with amusing style and vocal beauty.

The production was also helped immeasurably by the colorful, outrageous costumes of Bethany Deal (pictured above). A special acknowledgement also needs to go out to trumpeters Daniel Norris and Rob Wilkins in the orchestra who did a splendid job in some of Handel's most festive music.

The final opera of the festival, American Apollo, was a complex, emotionally resonant triumph that premiered in Des Moines in 2024. The libretto by Lila Palmer is unusually intelligent, giving every character their due, and it's singable as well without a lot of extraneous text. The score by Damian Geter is written in a conservative, tonal idiom that manages to stay compelling throughout, and at times lyrically beautiful. You could hear the audience breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn't going to be a thorny musical afternoon in the theater. The narrative is fascinating, centering on Thomas McKeller, a young black man who was part of the Great Migration from Wilmington, North Carolina to Boston, Massachusetts at the beginning of the 20th century. While working as an elevator attendant at the upscale Hotel Vendome in Boston, McKeller was approached by the famous painter John Singer Sargent who asked if he would model for him.

Tenor John Bellemer did a fine job as Sargent, and soprano Marnie Breckenridge was reliably brilliant as the rich, eccentric patroness Isabella Stewart Gardner, who was building her Boston art museum. She has just commissioned Sargent to create murals of gods and goddesses for it, with Sargent using McKeller as a body model, erasing his face and black skin while having him pose as everyone from Achilles to Apollo.

Though Sargent has never been officially tagged as homosexual by historians, anecdotally among acquaintances it was well-known, and in this opera it is posited that the relationship between model and painter was an on-again, off-again love affair, interrupted by McKeller's fear of exploitation and then by World War One. When that war ended, Sargent reunited with McKeller and proposed that they travel through Europe together, but the young man turned him down, saying being a "kept man" would destroy him. Incidentally, a friend who saw the world premiere of this opera in Des Moines two years ago said, "This is a much gayer production than we saw in Iowa."

Markel Reed gave a magnificent performance as Thomas McKeller, and his baritone was one of the strongest voices to be heard in the entire festival. His final aria, as he discovered the nude portrait Sargent painted of him and kept hidden away in his private collection, was a fitting finale.

The new Music Director of the Oakland Symphony, Kedrick Armstrong, guided the 21-person orchestra expertly, and the scenic designer Nina Ball did an excellent job creating a unit set that could easily be everything from a hotel lobby to an artist's studio with the change of a few props and lighting. Finally, director Nataki Garrett created a sensitive, believable world onstage. Their contributions were a reminder that West Edge Opera is a serious local treasure, and you can still see all three operas in the festival's upcoming final weekend. Click here for tickets.