La Rondine
Giacomo Puccini (Music); Giuseppe Adami (Libretto)
English Translation by Donald Pippin
Pocket Opera in a Co-Production with Mercury Theater
Composed in 1913 as a commissioned Viennese operetta, Giacomo Puccini’s La Rondine overflows with music sumptuous and mesmerizing as well as contagiously inviting with its ballroom-worthy waltzes and hints of country polkas and nightclub foxtrots. Giuseppe Adami’s libretto of a young woman’s surprise discovery of true love after her rejection of promised but loveless jewels lures its audience into imagining a happily ever after ending, but an Act Three’s reality check turns a fairytale romance into a bittersweet and heartbreaking finale. With a cast of fabulous actors whose radiant, rich voices elicit our gasps of delight, moments of laughter, and expressions of tears, Pocket Opera in a co-production with Mercury Theatre presents a gripping, gorgeous, and grand La Rondine in a chamber setting intimate and immediate between performers and audience.
As elegantly dressed women surround Magda in her Parisian salon, this mistress of wealthy Rambaldo welcomes the poet Prunier who warns the assembled that “an epidemic has has swept the nation … a weapon of the devil.” When pressed to reveal the culprit, he responds with a twinkle and grin, “True love.” To that, a scowling Rambaldo retorts, “That notion long outdated.”
Noting that “from poison so appealing, there is small hope of healing,” Prunier proceeds to prove his point by relating a song he has written about “Doretta.” With a poet’s dramatic flair and a stirring tenor voice that beautifully conveys the story, Alex Taite’s Prunier begins a tale how “true love cannot be traded and neither gold nor silver feed the starving heart.”
Pausing in the middle of telling how Doretta rejects a king’s riches for the true love of another, Prunier turns to Magda to finish the tale. This handover is our first of many moments during the next two-plus hours to relish the reverberating, resounding soprano excellence of Michelle Allie Drever as her Magda delivers one of the opera’s most famous and beloved arias. With notes that powerfully soar up and down scales magnificent — only to sustain for prolonged periods in rolling ‘ah’s’ — we cannot help but be duly impressed with her wide range of octaves and her contrasts and control of volume. Like the poem’s heroine, Magda reveals to her enraptured audience in the parlor,
“Who cares for pomp and power
When roses are in flower
And the skies are fair?
Of love, dream on!
For I may find it there.”
Employing a compelling but smug baritone, Rambaldo (Michael Kuo) tempts Magda with a bejeweled necklace, singing, “I have a magic charm stronger than your devil,” to which with firm notes of resolve she answers, “My heart in not for purchase.”
She then relays in song a time she met in a beer hall an “enchanting lovely darling” of a man who captured for the moment her heart but from whom she fled: “Was it fear? Who can say?… Who knows why?”
With heart-rendering notes of pulsating power, Magda sings, “If only I could savor the joy of that brief, shining hour,” ending with a haunting, “That incredible encounter haunts me yet.”
That remembering plus a palm reading by Prunier provide us clues of what is later to be in store for the love-seeking Magda. With exciting tenor notes and a face lit with intrigue, Prunier promises, “Like a migrating swallow (i.e., “la rondine”) you will soar across the sea toward the golden horizon of your dreams … the sunlit island of love.” But a warning follows that what will occur next is in Fate’s hands, “Maybe heaven, maybe hell.”
Palm readings and memories of desired love begin to materialize into reality as a young stranger later enters the lively dance hall that Magda has decided to visit in the disguise of a shop girl that she has named “Paulette.” There, flower girls looking for a few francs, students looking for a lady’s kiss (or more), and lusty women looking for “a man with millions” join in a scene of dancing and well-sung and harmonized revelry (as joyfully and rambunctiously stage directed by Elly Lichenstein). Magda escapes the gropings of lust-hungry students by plopping herself at the table of the young (and boyishly handsome) stranger, and soon her sung memory that occurred at that very dance hall begins to play out once again.
Like Romeo and Juliet, it takes barely a glance eye-to-eye and a touch of two hands on the table before Magda and Ruggero are each singing of their newfound, true love. Matching Magda’s already proven ability to wow each and all with her soprano brilliance, Maxwell Ary proclaims in a tenor voice that zings with Ruggero’s zeal for her love, “Spell bounding enchantment, never to vanish.” Together, the two powerhouse voices soar as Magda and Ruggero so quickly declare, “Two hearts beating as one; spring is the season when love is born.”
But this pair of blossoming lovers is not the only bouquet of lovers present. Prunier has entered with none other than Magda’s bold and brazen maid, Lisette, who is not shy to smoke a cigar or down from the bottle some champagne even as she is supposed to be serving guests or her mistress. But now she is dressed to the hilt in one of Magda’s own gowns, and the scene of her seeing Magda in a lowly girl’s dress intertwined in the arms of the young Ruggero even as Magda tries to warn her to be silent is a scene of much hilarity.
The two couples become an ongoing contrast between one set in googly eyed love and another set more often than not in a battle of quarreling wits. But for one glorious moment, this quartet of lovers raises their astounding soprano and tenor vocals while joined by the entire dance hall ensemble in a soaring salute to “celebrate life itself that offers the gift of love.” For her part, Melissa Sondhi titillates the setting with Lisette’s spunk and spark and electrifies the stage with her agile, piercing, and crystalline soprano.
Here the opera could easily end if happy endings were in the making, especially after Magda rejects seemingly once and for all the abusive Rambaldo in a firm declaration of her desire to pursue true-felt love over riches. But a third act brings both an abundance of the intertwined bodies and vocals of two lovers now in an idyllic, country setting as well as a turn of events sure to tear at audience heartstrings. However splendid have been the vocal and acting impressions left by both Michelle Allie Drever and Maxwell Ary up to now, the final fifteen minutes or so are some of the most breathtaking ones I can ever remember in an opera, especially given their combination of sensitive, sensuous, and stunning deliveries and also because the poignant events are taking place almost within hand’s reach of us as audience.
Throughout, Mary Chun directs the twelve member Pocket Opera to ensure true partnership with singers in which instruments and voices often mesh and mingle in ways to become one entity of luxurious music. The humor, joy, forebodings, and ultimate sadness of the story are embedded in Puccini’s score and are beautifully communicated by this accomplished group of musicians.
For forty-nine years, Pocket Opera has provided Bay Area audiences the unique opportunity to experience grand opera in a chamber-like setting, making the classics so much more accessible both physically and through founder Donald Pippin’s extensive library of English-translated librettos. Being able to enjoy Puccini in such a manner with a cast and total production that opera companies across the country would surely envy makes Pocket Opera and Mercury Theater’s co-production of La Rondine a summer-time gift extraordinaire for Bay Area audiences.
Rating: 5 E
La Rondine continues July 19, 2026, at Hillside Club, Berkeley and July 26, 2026, at Gunn Theatre, Legion of Honor in San Francisco in a two-hour, thirty-minute (plus intermission) production by Pocket Opera and in co-production with Mercury Theater. Tickets are available at http://pocketopera.org.
Photo Credits: Mike Thompson
