Twenty-Seven, the highly anticipated opera about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, opened in the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. The audiences have been big and the reviews very positive.
Twenty-Seven focuses on Stein and Toklas’s Paris Salon which was visited by a who’s who of twentieth century greats: Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso and Rene Matisse to name but a few.
Stephanie Blythe plays Stein and Elizabeth Futral portrays Toklas. James Robinson, the artistic director of the Opera Theatre, said, ‘It’s fantastic that right here in the middle of the country we’re doing these things and people are just fine with it.’
Sarah Bryan Miller of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch gave the production her thumbs up:
“Blythe is a force of nature whose large frame supports a stupendous voice of great range. She made an utterly believable Stein, secure in her absolute rightness, hilarious and sometimes cruel in her epigrams. (‘I’ve met many geniuses in my time,’ she tells Man Ray. ‘You, my dear, are a photographer.’) She surrenders in a belated trial of conscience, over the way in which she and Alice survived the horrors of World War II as American Jews in Vichy France.
“Singers love Gordon’s music because he knows what works vocally and what doesn’t, and because he cares about getting it right. He has said that he hopes to see the day when opera and musical theater meet, and 27 helps to bring it closer. There are hummable tunes and recurring themes, drama and sweetness, in a well-wrought score. Vavrek is Steinian without stealing Stein and keeps the story moving, for a clever, witty libretto.”
