Review- Elmer Gantry at the Florentine

Of the many thrills during the Florentine Opera’s production of Elmer Gantry Friday night, the biggest one came after the final curtain fell, when composer Robert Aldridge and librettist Herschel Garfein joined the cast and designers in the final curtain call. If you’re not sure why that’s a big deal, you’re probably not an opera fan, for productions by living composers are a rare thing.
But judging from the ovations after the performance, Milwaukee is ready for more contemporary opera, particularly if it as sonically striking and dramatically potent as Elmer Gantry.
Sinclair Lewis’s original character isn’t really the stuff of an opera hero. The novel is a scathing satire, and Gantry is as unlikeable a character as you’d care to meet, in Kansas or anywhere else. Librettist Herschel Garfein wisely tempers him, making him more like a kid who never grows up, a naïf who stumbles through various paths, but is strong willed enough to drag people along after he picks a direction.
With this Gantry at the center, the opera becomes less a satire than a story that poses genuine questions about the nature and limitations (and excesses) of faith and religion. One of the most poignant moments of the evening is an aria–beautifully sung by Vale Rideout, playing Gantry’s college friend, Frank Shallard–that asks the basic questions about the origins of faith.
But there is plenty of spectacle and big, operatic emotions as well. Composer Robert Aldridge loves the grandness of grand opera; there’s enough choral music here for it to resemble an oratorio. In the beginning of Act Two, a tender, intimate love scene is followed by a rousing set piece that includes uses a double quartet and a chorus to convey the two conflicting ideas of organized religion that do battle throughout the story.
Aldridge loves a big musical canvas, and the Americana-tinged orchestrations draw on the wide-open harmonies of Aaron Copland and the free-form blues of George Gershwin. But his sense of big drama reminded me even more of Stephen Sondheim—in full-tilt Jonathan Tunick orchestrations. Conductor William Boggs and the Milwaukee Symphony gave them great, singing power.
As Gantry, Keith Phares is the perfect football hero turned preacher—a voice full of swagger that’s also capable of a childlike introspection. But Patricia Risley just isn’t quite right for his love interest, the preacher Sharon Falconer. Her voice isn’t loose enough to handle the bluesy fluidity of the part, and her body language is too stiff for someone who can move to the rhythm of a revival meeting. Supporting roles, including Shallard, Frank Kelley and Heather Buck–as a rival preacher and his wife—are all first rate. All of them adding a solid sense of character and music to a sweeping American tapestry that should remain in the American repertory for a long time.