FROM AROUND THE WORLD: TUCSON/PHOENIX.(Review)

Since David Speers succeeded Glynn Ross as general director, Arizona Opera has moved toward modernized production values and younger casts. This has rinsed away the dust and cheered rank-and-file operagoers in Tucson and Phoenix.

But until January, productions were all rented from other companies. A new La Fanciulla del West, co-produced with the Austin and Utah companies, changed that. (Somewhat curiously for a Western opera company, this was the first Fanciulla in the thirty seasons of Arizona Opera.) A production of verve and style, this was a straightforward version of Puccini's mid-career opus that employed atmosphere as compensation for the story's melodramatic absurdities. Stage-director Joseph McClain and set-designer Christopher McCollum made the environment a major character. Minnie and her minions at the Polka were wards of the piney Sierra, their fates somehow tangled in the branches of the trees. A sharply raked stage thrust the action into audiences' laps.

Seen on January 20 in Tucson, Mary Jane Johnson, currently the reigning Minnie, succeeded in making us care about her strange character's solitary existence and old-fashioned moral code. Something about Minnie is not entirely innocent, despite all her protestations of never having been kissed; there has to be a hardness -- a moral toughness -- somewhere within a girl who remains chaste while running a bar in an Old West mining camp. Johnson projected this without letting go of the character's surface innocence. She was also in especially splendid voice, singing with authority and freedom, producing a sound not merely big but with unexpected bloom in the upper range.

Her Ramerrez was tenor Patrick Denniston. At first a little squeezed on top, Denniston opened up in Act II, and in the Act III aria, "Ch'ella mi creda libero e lontano," he produced a sound of spin and substance. The role of bad-guy Sheriff Jack Rance fell to Donnie Ray Albert, whose powerful, lucid baritone dominated his every scene. He also used his commanding stage presence to make his character a little less hateful, but no less menacing.

Owing to a two-city schedule that requires back-to-back performances, Arizona Opera double-casts all the big roles. Seen in Phoenix on January 26, an alternate cast (Arizona Opera does not designate one cast as "first" and another as "second") gave us Pamela ...