Skill and ‘Desire’ Intersect Fatefully in San Diego Staging

To whatever operatic niche Andre Previn and Philip Littell’s handsome, regularly gripping setting of “A Streetcar Named Desire” is finally relegated--hit, miss, succes d’estime or noble failure--one thing was clear when San Diego Opera opened its production Saturday night in Civic Theatre: It satisfies an audience, at least this often discerning audience. And it gives its cast of singing actors abundant opportunities to display their polished skills.

In its third mounting--first, in the world premiere at San Francisco Opera in September 1998, then in a staging in New Orleans last month--this eye-catching, appropriately postmodernist production by Michael Yeargan, with atmospheric lighting and projection designs by Thomas J. Munn, imaginatively re-creates the setting of late-1940s New Orleans and provides the right background for the famously familiar play.

That background gives the actors and the observers their bearings; had it not done so, the opera would falter. As it is, the skeletal but furnished, moving unit set with detachable parts--the kitchen, the bedroom and the important staircase--becomes a major player in the action.

Conducted with style and deep authority by Karen Keltner, San Diego Opera’s longtime music administrator, and directed by Brad Dalton after the original San Francisco staging by Colin Graham, the Saturday performance moved seamlessly through the drama’s revelatory and inexorable progress. Previn’s attractive, colorful and cinematically descriptive score seemed more than ever the right musical milieu for the operatic version of the play.

The San Diego cast, uniformly strong and convincing as actors, effortless as singing musicians, is an ensemble tightly prepared for the hurdles posed by composer Previn and librettist Littell.

It is, of course, dominated by the Blanche of Sheryl Woods, who first sang it in New Orleans in March. Still in the midst of a distinguished and varied career, Woods has achieved a high point in this role, which demands agility, lyric control, dramatic force and endless stamina.

Woods meets all challenges, including the visual and histrionic ones that make the character live. And she does so, as did her predecessor in the part, Renee Fleming, without ever revealing the difficulties therein. This faceted Blanche even ends the opera sounding fresh.

Elizabeth Futral, the original Stella in San Francisco, achieves, as she did on the subsequent CD recording and the PBS broadcast, the musical and dramatic depths required. David Okerlund’s Stanley inhabits that famous role with a relish for acting and an effortless musicality. Balancing muscle and brain is the problem here; Okerlund solves it in smooth integration. If his gritty baritone is undistinctive, that does not matter much in this context.

The versatile Anthony Dean Griffey repeats his touching portrayal of Mitch, and misses no detail; his self-revealing second-act aria is particularly touching. Suzanna Guzman is an apt Eunice Hubbell, acting with resourcefulness and singing with clarity and a handsome sound. Jeffrey Lentz, like Futral and Griffey another veteran of the San Francisco premiere, stands out again as the Young Collector.

* San Diego Opera’s production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” will be repeated Tuesday at 7 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. in Civic Theatre, 202 C St., San Diego. $31-$98. (619) 570-1100.