All-Star Lineup

By TERRY TEACHOUT

Thousands of sports fans jammed the streets of Cooperstown, N.Y., a sleepy lakeside village (pop. 2,200) in the foothills of the Catskills, to watch as George Brett, Orlando Cepeda, Nolan Ryan and Robin Yount were inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. But there was another all-star team playing in Cooperstown that weekend: eight miles up the road, Glimmerglass Opera was presenting the world premiere of Central Park, a trio of one-act operas with librettos by three top playwrights: A.R. Gurney (Love Letters), Terrence McNally (Master Class) and Wendy Wasserstein (The Heidi Chronicles). It was quite a lineup for a one-stoplight town--but nothing out of the ordinary for a summer opera festival that is increasingly regarded as the best of its kind.

Old-time buffs for whom opera means Pavarotti on an elephant may be puzzled by a company in which the sets are simple and the voices not always of the very highest octane. But Glimmerglass, which produces four operas each summer (the current season runs through Aug. 23), is not about gleaming high Cs; instead, the show is the star. Artistic director Paul Kellogg and music director Stewart Robertson hire young artists who know how to move as well as sing and directors and designers with a knack for knocking the rust off tired masterpieces. Add to this the special pleasure of watching opera in a theater small enough that you can see Rigoletto's eyebrow twitch from the back row of the balcony, and you get productions so bold and vivid that they make you remember why you fell in love with opera in the first place.

"Astonishing stage pictures can be wonderful, but they're not enough," says Kellogg, 62, who, by all accounts, has been the prime mover in turning Glimmerglass into a major force in American opera. "We keep our productions spare so that the audience can concentrate on what is happening between the characters onstage. We look for singers who are really good actors--and then we give them room to act."

Since 1996, Kellogg has also been in charge of the New York City Opera, which performs at Lincoln Center in a 2,700-seat house whose stage is identical in size to that of Glimmerglass's 900-seat Alice Busch Opera Theater. This makes it possible for productions to be opened and polished in Cooperstown, then moved to New York City, where they can be seen by bigger audiences (and telecast over PBS). The two companies also share an ensemble of theatrically savvy young American singers, foremost among them soprano Lauren Flanigan, whose Olivier-like immersion in her roles has won her a well-deserved reputation as the thinking person's diva. Flanigan sings two sharply contrasting parts in Central Park--a frustrated divorce in The Festival of Regrets (book by Wasserstein, music by Deborah Drattell) and a desperate bag lady in The Food of Love (book by McNally, music by Robert Beaser)--and brings them both off with staggering assurance.

Flanigan is far from the only good thing about Central Park, which moves to Lincoln Center Nov. 12 and will air on PBS later in the year. Michael Yeargan has set all three operas in a whitewashed loft full of in-line skaters, Frisbee tossers and phone-toting middle managers; and Mark Lamos, the director, has staged them with a surefooted blend of clarity and fantasy. Wasserstein's heart-on-sleeve wisecracks and Drattell's klezmer-flavored score made The Festival of Regrets the strongest of the three, though the clear audience favorite was Strawberry Fields (book by Gurney, music by Michael Torke), in which Joyce Castle plays a sweetly befuddled old woman who thinks her park bench is a seat at the opera house.

All in all, Central Park is both musically accessible and dramatically compelling--the twin trademarks of Glimmerglass's deceptively simple house style. It's a "third way" between avant-garde eccentricity and the cliches of old-fashioned grand-opera production that promises to lift the face of opera in America. If that happens, much of the credit will belong to Kellogg. "Glimmerglass is all very much about what Paul likes," says Lamos admiringly. "An elegant delivery, a neatness of style--but with passion too."