XERXES - CONNECTICUT EARLY MUSIC FESTIVAL

Co-Pro Connecticut Early Music Festival, Academy of Music Theater, Arcadia Players
Stage Director: Eve Summer
Conductor: Ian Watson
Arcadia Players Period Instrument Orchestra
Scenic Design: Julia Noulin-Merat
Costume Design: Kathleen Doyle
Lighting Design: Michael Clark Wonson

Xerxes at Connecticut Early Music Festival

" A gifted director offers a version of Xerxes that's eye-poppingly contemporary... Irrepressible color, visual and vocal, made the piece a delight and a testament to Summer's gift for banishing stodginess from an art form too often seen as fossilized and elitist... Summer has a gift for translating classic symbolism into familiar detail with just enough flippancy to bring out the fun of the opera without skewing the emotional equation... charmingly choreographed…Street-Smart…Summer's imagination has a long reach; you see it in the subtitles she writes for the operas she directs - including Cosi fan tutte, also played at the Academy - in which street language pops like firecrackers...Since Handel himself was criticized for adding elements of comedy to Xerxes, she was on solid ground."
The Valley Advocate

"Summer's work is always spot on…Summer set the action in our time...it ends up seeming perfectly natural....veritably choreographed... The Summer-Watson collaborations are always imaginative, fruitful, enjoyable, and satisfying in their combinations of old and new, traditional and adventuresome… The projected English surtitles, freely translated by Summer, were in modern colloquial speech, sometimes racy, sometimes profane, and occasionally elicited some chuckles from the audience... [Summer's titles] communicate the essence of the thoughts behind the words in current slang...and helped the audience buy into the spirit of the production."
Boston Musical Intelligencer

“Arcadia's beautifully performed, audaciously but credibly staged SERSE compared well to the NY City Opera production from the 1990's... rousing......light-hearted... The humor and pathos of Handel's opera of love rivalry, crossed signals, and deception was finely conveyed …under stage director/producer Eve Summer [who] portrayed every nuance of their characters… I should mention that the surtitles, in a translation by stage director Summer, matched her staging, with updated, occasionally scatological wording that added to audience laughter.”
Opera ListServ