Music : Rams Owner Claims Victory in ‘Amahl’

Normally, the announcement of a college production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors” would draw a ho-hum response from the music press. But Chapman University’s “Amahl” Friday night had considerable curiosity value going for it.

The role of King Melchior would be sung by the veteran baritone Richard Fredricks, a once-frequent visitor with the New York City Opera. And heading the cast, as Amahl’s Mother, was none other than Georgia Frontiere, beleaguered owner of the hapless Los Angeles Rams football team and also, we were assured, a soprano with “extensive professional credits.”

However, those who came with their pens sharpened would best save their sharpest barbs for the sorry spectacles at nearby Anaheim Stadium. As it turned out, Madame Ram made a decent showing as the poverty-stricken Mother, whom Menotti humanizes in terms that no 20th-Century suburban child could miss.

Frontiere has an appropriate voice for the part, a slightly hollow soprano of mostly operatic timbre with a touch of Broadway in the lower regions.

She displayed sensitivity to the lines and curves of each phrase, and she could push the right emotional buttons as an actress. Yet she did lose control of the high A in her quartet with the Three Kings midway through the opera, and there were a few pitch problems later on.

For his part, Fredricks was the solid rock of the performance, exuding a sonorous, dignified, almost Wotan-like authority at all times. Shannon Mack (son of Music Center Opera tenor Jonathan Mack) was a cute, playful, somewhat dimly heard Amahl; Robert Poizner a sly, even slightly demented King Kaspar; Duane Carter a somewhat underpowered King Balthazar; and Andrew Sweeney a thick-voiced Page.

Stage director Patrick Goeser stuck pretty much to Menotti’s painstakingly detailed playbook, populating his small stage with raggedy yet colorfully clothed shepherds and a carefully weather-beaten hut.

From the makeshift orchestra “pit,” William Hall was able to mold his shepherds (the Chapman University Singers) into a bright, mostly cohesive unit. But, alas, the string section of the Chapman University Chamber Orchestra frequently came to grief in exposed passages.

Incidentally, despite the lure of Frontiere and Fredricks, there were large stretches of empty seats in Chapman’s Memorial Auditorium Friday.

At least, on this occasion, Frontiere was spared the indignity of facing bedsheets with the scrawled message from disgruntled Rams fans, “Georgia: Sell the Team.”