Fledgling Stageworks Festival Full of Ambition But Not Yet Ready to Soar

At first glance, the handful of people on the lawn looked like volunteers: Women of a certain age, holding homemade signs, they seemed to be directing cars turning off the highway in search of a new opera and music festival on the Village Green in Indian Head. At second glance, they turned out to be protesters, there to speak out against, of all things, a Puccini opera.

"Suor Angelica Promotes Suicide," ran the gist of their banners. "Suicide Is Against Our Religion." It has been many years since Puccini stirred up this kind of controversy.

Lisa Kay Morton, the founder of the unbelievably ambitious, two-week Stageworks festival, is learning that well-meant ideas don't always translate seamlessly into reality. Evidently, in the spoken remarks before Monday's big-band concert, it was mentioned that Tuesday's double bill of operas included one about a nun who commits suicide, and this rubbed one of the listeners the wrong way. But it is doubtful whether the protesters had actually read the libretto of "Suor Angelica." Angelica is shut in the convent by a stony-hearted aunt as punishment for giving birth to an illegitimate son; at the news that her child has died, she takes poison in order to join him and, immediately consumed with guilt at having committed a mortal sin, begs the Virgin for forgiveness.

The degree to which the opera's redemptive conclusion, capped with a vision of the Virgin herself, crosses the line between extreme emotion and pure kitsch depends partly on the production and partly on the eye, or ear, of the beholder. But it is not generally thought to be offensive to Catholics. When Puccini was working on the opera in 1917, he visited his sister, who was mother superior of a convent, and played the music for the nuns. They wept.

Of course, organizers didn't help explain to the protesters, or anybody else, what the opera was actually about, since on Tuesday the programs for the festival, which began last Friday, had not been printed yet.

If there is reason to protest anything about Stageworks, it is the Charles County festival's overambitious goals. Morton, a local singer and voice teacher, founded it to give young singers experience through a program of master classes, coaching and performances. Participants range from children to undergraduates to 50-something community-theater veterans, with a sprinkling of young professionals. This is a laudable thing. The unrealistic part is trying to put on three operas ("Suor Angelica" was paired with "Pagliacci," and "The Magic Flute" is also on the program) and a musical ("Ragtime"), interspersed with other concerts so that there is an event virtually every night, with a group of 87 singers of varying and sometimes extremely limited levels of experience, within a two-week period.

To stage one opera under these conditions would be notable; three, to paraphrase Wilde's Lady Bracknell, looks like carelessness, or at least it did in this production.

If the point is simply to get young people on an outdoor stage and give them the experience of singing in an unfamiliar language in front of a few dozen people in folding chairs on the lawn, well and good. But young and amateur singers might have more of an experience of success if they were showcased in works that better fit their abilities.

"Suor Angelica" and "Pagliacci" are big pieces that call for major voices. Tiffany Roberts sang Angelica with moving commitment, and Xela Pinkerton showed a big earnest voice as her aunt, La Zia Principessa (though her costume, as Spartan as the nuns' makeshift habits, did not give any outward indication of the character's material wealth). But they might have learned more had they been able to sing without amplification, with an actual conductor and an accompaniment that featured a few more instruments than piano, flute and synthesizer.

Morton herself is keenly aware that she has heaped too much on her plate. "I'm humbled," she said before Tuesday's show, talking about the steep learning curve of this first year's festival. In the future, she wants to put on fewer productions over a longer span of time. Yet one of the operas she mentions is "Aida," another piece that is, to put it mildly, not ideally suited to half-trained voices.

The young singers are clearly working incredibly hard and, one hopes, having fun. But the learning that needs to take place at Stageworks involves not only its performance, but its pedagogy.

Stageworks continues through June 29; the "Suor Angelica"/"Pagliacci" double bill repeats on June 24.