12:31 PM CDT on Monday, June 26, 2006

By SCOTT CANTRELL / The Dallas Morning News

ST. LOUIS – With adventuresome repertory and often provocative productions, not to mention pre-performance picnic dinners on lovely landscaped grounds, Opera Theatre of St. Louis is right up there with Santa Fe and Glimmerglass as one of the country's top summer destinations for opera lovers.

In 31 seasons, the company has mounted 17 world premieres and 21 American premieres, the latter including this summer's Jane Eyre. Webster University's intimate 987-seat Loretto-Hilton Center, in suburban Webster Groves, Mo., and an everything-in-English policy lend a theatrical immediacy rarely associated with opera.

This summer's five-week season, which closes Sunday, included a rare venture into musical theater, Kurt Weill's Street Scene, along with operatic staples The Barber of Seville and Hansel and Gretel.

Street Scene is exactly what it says it is: a slice of life outside a 1930s New York tenement peopled by a veritable United Nations of ethnicities. There's birth and death, love and lack thereof, and every one of the seven deadly sins raises its head.

Based on the eponymous Elmer Rice play, turned into a libretto by Langston Hughes, the work bridges the gap between Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and Bernstein's Candide. James Robinson's St. Louis staging made a gripping and touching case for it during the June 17 evening performance, the large cast filled out with apprentice singers. OTSL music director Stephen Lord conducted with drama and affectionate eloquence.

Vocal beauties of conventional operatic type weren't always priorities. But standouts in the cast included Garrett Sorenson (all frustrated decency as Sam Kaplan), Jeffrey Wells (a seething, sinister Frank Maurrant) and Jennifer Aylmer (her sweet young Rose Maurrant darkened by tragedy). Leah Dexter and Kelly Markgraf did some fancy hoofing as Mae Jones and Dick McGann, to choreography by Seán Curran. Jonathan Green gets kudos for coaching vividly varied accents, and Sandra Horst for strong choral contributions.

Until the arrival of the witch, Hansel and Gretel requires a high saccharine tolerance. Fortunately, OTSL had a fabulous witch in Maria Zifchak (June 18), by turns nutty and sinister, and capable of singing as splendidly as she cackled. She doubled capably as the mother.

Actually, apart from Katherine Jolly's keen-voiced Dew Fairy, the whole cast was fine. The "children" were plausibly petite and vocally apt: Leah Wool as Hansel, Saundra De Athos as Gretel. Ian Greenlaw was the sturdy father. Stage director Michael Patrick Albano didn't shy away from the "awww" factor, and Emanuele Luzzati supplied storybook sets and costumes. (The porcupine was adorable.) William Long made lovely work of Engelbert Humperdinck's score.

Every once in a while, one of OTSL's revisionist stagings turns out to be a real stinker. This year it was Ken Cazan's travesty of The Barber of Seville (June 17, afternoon).

Updating the action to the 1920s was plausible, and one could make an argument for turning Dr. Bartolo into a mad scientist in set designer Cameron Anderson's surrealist study. But such a tempest of hyperactivity and dumb gags you've never seen; about the only thing missing was a flatulence joke. Maybe this was an attempt to counteract conductor Dean Williamson's often sluggish tempos.

Kate Lindsey somehow managed to sing gorgeously as Rosina, and young Alek Shrader's Almaviva raised hopes for careful cultivation of his slender but promising lyric tenor. Janna Baty's Berta turned out to be quite a singer, but Hugh Russell's Figaro, Patrick Carfizzi's Bartolo and Joshua Winograde's Basilio were too often subverted by all the silly goings-on.

E-mail scantrell@dallasnews.com