OPERA COMES TO STAGE AT S.D. SYMPHONY HALL

Now that San Diegans have become accustomed to calling the former Fox Theatre Symphony Hall, the San Diego Symphony is ready to invoke the room’s more traditional theatrical appeal. Not that this week’s staging of one-act operas by Francis Poulenc, Samuel Barber and Kurt Weill will be anything like the revue “Jazz Temple Idea” that inaugurated the house in 1929 or the traveling Broadway musicals that played the Fox in the 1970s. But the orchestra will be down in the pit and the drama will again be stage center.

In January, the symphony presented Stravinsky’s theater piece “The Soldier’s Tale” with the actors parading and dancing around the onstage instrumentalists, but the dramaturgy of the four performances beginning Thursday and running through Sunday will be closer to traditional opera.

“We’re not doing these as full-scale operatic productions, because we’re not using elaborate sets and costumes,” said Marcus Overton, the symphony’s guest stage director. “In these three operas, sets and costumes don’t really matter because the pieces are not about special effects and spectacle, but about people who find themselves in intense situations.”

Overton, who is in charge of the performing arts productions at Washington’s Smithsonian Institution and previously worked as production stage manager at Chicago’s Lyric Opera, met the challenge of staging these shoestring opera productions by employing the platforms on which the orchestra regularly plays.

“When I came out to San Diego last month to get the final production engine running, I was worried that there might not be any money available for these productions,” Overton said. “But it turned out that the platforming is so flexible that we have devised a look that I think will work.”

Poulenc’s “La Voix Humaine” (“The Human Voice”), a lyric drama for solo voice and orchestra written in 1958 on a text by Jean Cocteau, will open the program. After intermission, Barber’s nine-minute “A Hand of Bridge” will act as the curtain-raiser for Weill’s “Mahoganny Songspiel,” that composer’s first collaboration with dramatist Bertolt Brecht.

In 1927, the Brecht-Weill “Songspiel” catapulted that duo into the limelight, with such diverse figures as conductor Otto Klemperer and the young Aaron Copland in the approving opening-night audience. The crafty sociopolitical parody in the form of a revue--there is no such thing as a “Songspiel,” a term the cantankerous Brecht simply made up--became the basis for the 1930 full-scale opera “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” which has undergone several notable revivals in international opera houses in recent years.

When asked if the short operas have a common thread, Overton said: “Each has an intense humanness. The woman in ‘La Voix Humaine’ is at the very edge of her existence--indeed she may have already gone beyond it and taken the 12 pills she alludes to in her phone conversation.

“The Mahagonny people are at a different kind of edge, because they always have no place to go, although they always look for that elusive place. They are looking for what Tennessee Williams called ‘That long delayed, but always expected, something that we live for.’

“The couples in ‘A Hand of Bridge’ are much the same. They can’t deal with life as it is in their conventional surroundings.”

Keeping the satiric edge of the Weill piece is Overton’s main challenge. “The world has changed greatly since 1927. After the movie ‘Apocalypse Now,’ how could anything be biting?” he said. “It’s symptomatic of how far we have come from what was thought to be biting satire in the 1930s and ‘40s. The challenge is to try to get the number of levels of irony going in the piece that are there.”

Symphony music director David Atherton will conduct in the pit. British soprano Elizabeth Gale will sing the Poulenc role, as well as the soprano roles in the other two operas.

Other soloists are mezzo-soprano Linda Hurst, tenors Neil Jenkins and Joseph Cornwall, baritone Omar Ebrahim, and bass Terry Edwards, who appeared with the symphony last season in Henri Pousseur’s “The Passion According to Punch.”