When Opera Comes to Oakland
Everyone knows that July is Mosswood Meltdown and autumn is for raves in the redwoods, but for two glorious weeks in between, Oakland has its opera season. From August 1st through the 16th, the West Edge Opera company will be back on Lakeside for its annual festival at the Scottish Rite Center, with three shows spanning the centuries. Last year’s superb Wozzeck made me a fan, and given that every town with an opera company needs a Review of Books with an opera critic, this year I’m keenly back for more.
West Edge has been around for decades, but it’s only had a permanent Oakland address since 2022. Founded in 1979 as Berkeley Opera, the company put on a couple shows a year at the Julia Morgan Theater until 2009, when, like so many East Bay residents, it found itself unable to come to terms with its landlord. Performances were pushed first to the El Cerrito High School auditorium, then to a series of more guerrilla spaces: defunct auto plants, warehouses, and rail yards. During this nomadic period the company adopted the West Edge name, along with a commitment to avant-garde programming matching its surroundings. Happily, the Masonic vibe at the Scottish Rite Center is still plenty weird, and so is the opera.
West Edge eschews what general director Mark Streshinsky calls “top-ten” operas. While our friends in the West Bay are welcome to their Carmen (1875) and La Bohème (1896), Oakland audiences are treated every year to the before and after: harpsichord-backed Baroque works on the one hand, and twentieth-century and contemporary on the other. This year, staggered between performances of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (1954) and Damien Geter’s American Apollo (2024), the festival features a definite “before”: Rinaldo by George Frideric Handel (1711), the first Italian opera ever written for the London stage and the piece that made its composer a star. As is usual in the company’s Baroque revivals, this production comes with a twist, in this case a gleefully garish aesthetic lifted from superhero comics.
Last week I caught up with director Keturah Stickann before rehearsal to find out more. “When Mark first asked me to do Rinaldo,” she told me, “his brief was: I really want you to pull the funny out. And I was like, okay, I’m not a stranger to Handel being funny.” But the libretto presented challenges. The story is adapted from Torquato Tasso’s Renaissance epic Jerusalem Delivered, and sets its melodrama of magic and romance against the unfortunate background of the First Crusade. Rinaldo is a knight for the Christian cause. He cheerfully announces in his very first lines that “Rebellious Asia weeps / In final agony, facing its ultimate doom.” It’s not much of a laugh line.
Or is it? On closer review of the text, Stickann realized that if you take out the more ponderous historical flourishes, what’s left is a good-versus-evil quest in the shape of a superhero story. What genre better lends itself to comic deconstruction? Stickann thought of Ben Edlund’s parodic superhero the Tick, especially as seen in Patrick Warburton’s TV portrayal. “I have the DVD, and I rewatched some and it just occurred to me: the Tick is Rinaldo, and Rinaldo is the Tick. He’s this big, dumb superhero with no alter ego, his costume is his skin, and he just stomps around.” And yet, however literal-minded and oblivious, he nonetheless has real power “to take care of business, ridding the world of evil.”
With Rinaldo re-imagined as superhero, his friends and foes easily found their corresponding tropes. The libretto’s Argante, enemy king of an all-purpose Orientalist “Asia,” became the head of crime syndicate A.S.A. (check the supertitles to see what it stands for), and his sorceress lover Armida a spacey supervillainess in goth boots and a shoulder-spike gown. On the side of good, the crusader captain Goffredo is now the chief of police, and his daughter Almirena, Rinaldo’s beloved, the damsel in distress. Stickann feels that Almirena is the character who grows the most during the story; she starts as a manic pixie dream girl with her head in the clouds but has to come back down to earth.
All in all, she told me, the story translated so cleanly that little more had to be done with the Crusades context. A few strategic textual cuts sufficed, and what remains is a heroic arc, a love story, and a whole lot of spectacle.
In 1711, London wasn’t sure if it was ready for Italian opera. Handel was a freshly arrived foreigner when he wrote Rinaldo, and at the time, The Spectator groused that “we no longer understand the language of our own stage.” The Haymarket theater that commissioned the piece was taking a gamble, and the exotic setting was largely an excuse for eighteenth-century FX: the stage directions call for mermaids and fairies, a thunderous mountain, clashing armies, a flaming airborne dragon chariot and much more. West Edge’s show has streamlined much of this maximalism. Before directing opera Stickann danced professionally, and in addition to plenty of choreographed fights she has added six dancers—three cops, three minions—to keep the scenes moving. (Visual projections exclaiming POW! and BAM! are only to be expected.)
And then there’s the music. On his arrival from the Continent, Handel had all of two weeks to compose Rinaldo’s score; this turned out much to the work’s benefit, as the tight deadline forced him to reuse much of the best music from his earlier career on the Continent. The score strings together one banger after another: the villains get to chew the scenery, Almirena has multiple standout arias including the much-excerpted “Lascia ch’io pianga,” and Rinaldo himself gets to vaunt and bluster in numbers like “Or la tromba in suon festante,” but also has the haunting “Cara sposa” (in Handel’s own words, the “finest he ever made”) to give voice to his longing side.
Kyle Tingzon, who sings the lead role, told me that his favorite side of Handel is the way he weaves together music and text. “You can hear it in the melodies,” he says, “and in the way that the orchestra interacts with the singers.” Above all the music is where Rinaldo’s amorous side finds expression. “He needs a lot of guidance,” says Tingzon, “because we do a lot of crazy things when we’re in love.” But the fact that he will do anything for love is the heart of the character.
Tingzon is a countertenor, a male voice type roughly the same range as the female mezzo-soprano, which until recently was a niche specialty. Studying music as a college student in Manila, “I was training to be a tenor and not that great, to be honest. It felt too easy, and didn’t sound heroic or dramatic.” One day his voice teacher overheard him singing pop music in a higher register and said to him, “I think you’re a countertenor.” “And the first thing I said was, ‘What the hell is that?’”
What it is: an exacting combination of chest and head voice, supporting the higher range for power and fluency but also negotiating the passaggi, or shifts between registers, for an overall evenness of tone. (My personal experience, as a former bass who’s had to relearn to sing as an alto, testifies to just how difficult this is; and I’ve never tried to do it after performing a fight scene.) Countertenor parts show up most often in contemporary music and revivals of Baroque opera, which increasingly use it for parts originally written for castrati. In Handel’s time, male singers castrated before puberty were, as Tingzon puts it, “rock stars”; something about the gender presentation of an adult man heroically soaring above the male range sent hearts fluttering across Europe. The original Rinaldo was one Nicolò Grimaldi, aka “Nicolini,” whose swoon-worthiness can be judged by an anonymous 1718 treatise on “Eunuchism Display’d” which claimed to be “occasion’d by a young Lady’s falling in Love with Nicolini, who sung in the Opera at the Hay-Market, and to whom she had like to have been Married.”
West Edge hopes to give its audience their own chance to fall in love. The show “has a lot of heart,” Stickann told me; “there’s something quite lovely about how all the characters are relating to one another.” Tingzon would like to convince listeners that love conquers all. But both agree that above all, in this day and age, they simply want to offer a really good time. In a summer where our military is embarking on testosterone screenings and our empire can’t leave off strikes on rebellious Asia, a lovesick superhero with limbs of steel and an angel voice might be just the champion we need. See you at the Hay-Market.
Rinaldo is showing Sunday, August 2, 2pm; Saturday, August 8, 8pm; and Saturday, August 15, 2pm at the Scottish Rite Center, 1547 Lakeside Drive. Tickets at West Edge Opera.