Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington, D.C.
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The line between “opera and soap opera” is a fine one, explored thoroughly by Terrence McNally’s Golden Age, said Peter Marks in The Washington Post. This behind-the-scenes tale of the opening night of Vincenzo Bellini’s 1835 opera, I Puritani, mines a similar vein as earlier McNally works, including The Lisbon Traviata and the Maria Callas bio-portrait, Master Class. Here, Jeffrey Carlson movingly plays the composer, whose “fragile artist’s psyche” gets pushed near its breaking point by the backstage antics of his cast, a collection of singers whose talents are exceeded only by the size of their egos. The opera’s premiere unfolds just beyond the audience’s field of vision, while sundry “rivalries, jealousies, and insecurities” threaten to interrupt it.
McNally packs plenty of “good tragic irony” into his script, presenting us with characters who “obsess over immortality” yet today are known only to aficionados, said Christian Williams in the A.V. Club. The “world-galloping diva” Maria Malibran and the “baritone lothario” Antonio Tamburini, for example, were once roughly equivalent in stature to Janis Joplin or Jim Morrison. Yet McNally makes sure that such an ironic treatment never applies to Bellini himself. I Puritani would be the composer’s final opera before his own death, at 33. Together, Carlson and McNally create a soulful portrait of a man “acutely aware of his limited time on earth,” whose final work becomes a passionate attempt to “stave off oblivion.”