Review: Minnesota Opera stages eye-catching and well-sung ‘Romeo and Juliet’

A people divided, fighting amongst themselves, their differences leading to angry arguments and perhaps even violence.

That’s Verona. The Italian city is the setting for Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” and it wouldn’t be surprising if Minnesota Opera chose to open its season with French romantic Charles Gounod’s operatic adaptation of the tale precisely because its battle between love and hatred could be powerfully prescient to its audiences.

The theme resonates throughout the company’s consistently beautiful production, which is exceptionally eye-catching in design and exceedingly well sung by all of its principal performers. On opening night Saturday at St. Paul’s Ordway Music Theater, a convincing argument was made that Gounod’s lush and lovely score is an ideal fit for this most famous of love stories, its music able to make Shakespeare’s text even more emotionally affecting.

This production achieves that, thanks to the sound choices made by principal conductor Christopher Franklin and the lovers in the leads, Jasmine Habersham’s spunky and spirited Juliet and Evan LeRoy Johnson’s Roméo. Both singers exhibited tenderness and power in their portrayals, and Franklin and the Minnesota Opera Orchestra complemented them with an interpretation devoid of overwrought histrionics. They placed in stark relief the hatred of two feuding families and the contrasting gentleness of the titular two.

While a connection with contemporary issues is first suggested by our lovers entering in modern dress, they’re soon attired in the same middle-of-the-last-millennium aristocratic attire in which Sarah Bahr has fitted this production’s large cast. More abstract is William Boles’ set, which frames the central conflict with large two-dimensional roses and rows of cross-like swords hanging above the action.

Verona is a town in which sword brandishing seems to be a local habit, members of the Capulet and Montague clans frequently threatening one another and occasionally bursting into full-scale fencing matches full of trickery and narrow escapes. (Kudos to fight director Mason Tyer.) Disparate in tone but equally graceful is the balletic choreography of James Sewell.

The design is a slightly expanded version of what Minnesota Opera offered when it presented this opera in 2016. In that production, I recall mourning the death of the villainous Tybalt, just because he was the most vividly crafted character on stage. For this year’s version, I felt the same way about Charles H. Eaton’s Mercutio. There’s a joke in the film, “Shakespeare in Love” (a far from fact-based account of the creation of “Romeo and Juliet”), in which Shakespeare lets his boss believe that his character of Mercutio is the play’s central focus. In Eaton’s hands, you could believe it, for he’s bursting with swashbuckling charisma and a playful sense of humor matched only by Kara Morgan’s scene-stealing Stéphano.

If only there were more palpable passion between the lovers at the story’s center. While Habersham and Johnson sing of their love with invariably impressive voices, there’s very little heat between them when they’re at last in one another’s arms. They never seem swept away by uncontrollable desire or overcome by a profound feeling of connection.

But they sing their parts splendidly, as does the chorus directed by Celeste Marie Johnson, who, incidentally, is the sister of our Roméo. They’re also homegrown talent: Hailing from Pine Island, Minn., they got their start in Minnesota Opera’s youth initiative, Project Opera. Clearly, we have a far more nurturing environment than medieval Verona.

When: 7:30 p.m. Thu. and Sat., 2 p.m. Sun.

Where: Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, 345 Washington St., St. Paul

Tickets: $30-$249, available at 612-333-6669 or mnopera.org

Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.