Long Beach. (North America).

Aside from a couple of college-based productions of distant memory, Janacek's Jenufa has remained a history-book entry in the Los Angeles area, but little more. That, of course, makes it ideal fodder for the intrepid explorative force known as Long Beach Opera. In two performances in mid-June, and in typical Long Beach style, Janacek's post-Romantic heart-warmer surged and glowed on the company's small stage--the Richard and Karen Carpenter Performing Arts Center at Cal State Long Beach--reinforcing the reputation of Michael Milenski's remarkable enterprise. By some distance the oldest active company in its area, Long Beach Opera now approaches its twenty-fifth year as the little company that could.

This year's novelty--for a company that has brought forth an Elektra set on the Malibu shore and a Tales of Hoffmann among East Village druggies--was to locate Jenufa exactly as specified in the libretto (and clearly defined in the rich folk accents of Janacek's music). With Darcy Scanlin's remarkable set--two farm buildings lying on their sides, with smoke-belching chimneys facing outward--the audience was obliged, in Isabel Milenski's resourceful staging, to consider the action from two perspectives simultaneously.

The indoor-outdoor performing space was further framed by sporadic faces at the farmhouse windows; the result was a kind of constant visible nervousness that accorded nicely with the twitches and percussive outbursts in Janacek's wonderful score. Milenski is the daughter of founder and general director Michael Milenski; this was her second production for the company. Whispers of nepotism, a common crosscurrent in Southern California opera circles, ...