A Masked Ball, or a march of singing penguins

The good news as the Opera Company opens its 31st season is a cast of uniformly strong voices. Such gold-standard local favorites as baritone Gregg Baker (as Renato), mezzo-soprano Barbara Dever (Ulrica) and Angela Brown (Amelia) are here joined by such new and equally confident vocalists as tenor Marcus Haddock (in the central role of Riccardo) and Sarah Coburn (Oscar), all of them a delight to the ear, as was the chorus.

Unfortunately, opera must also delight the eye and the mind, and here this production falls short. In lieu of sets we are offered “virtual scenery”— a repetitive succession of painted images projected on a screen— and a bare minimum of props: one chair in Act 1; one gallows in Act 2; one chair, one desk and one table in Act 3. Without props or sets to relate to, the chorus of courtiers and plotters in their black and grey frock coats and breeches reminded me of the flippered protagonists of The March of the Penguins, whose massed bodies collectively create their own warm furnishings amid an otherwise frozen and barren plain.

The mostly wooden staging and acting don’t help matters: When Riccardo is fatally shot in the climactic ball scene, only his page Oscar rushes to his side, while everyone else who either loved Riccardo or hated him stands frozen in place until the final curtain, pretty much the way penguins do when one of their colleagues keels over during an ice storm.

Verdi, who based this opera on the real-life assassination of the Swedish King Gustavus III in 1792, was forced by Italian censors to camouflage the story and wound up ludicrously setting it in 17th-Century Puritan Boston. Too bad he didn’t think of Antarctica.