YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Opera Western Reserve hasn’t made a deal with the devil, but it will take a chilling turn for its annual production.
The company will present “Faust” on Sept. 20 at Powers Auditorium in downtown Youngstown. It will be OWR’s first crack at the opera about a doctor who bargains with Mephistopheles to be young again.
The timeless tale features lush music by Charles Gounod and a libretto in French by Jules Barbier and Michel Carre. The story is based on the Goethe novella.
The OWR version is being helmed by stage director Scott Skiba and music director Susan Davenny Wyner.
It will mark the first time OWR has presented its annual opera in late September; past productions have always been in November. The new date puts it at the start of the Halloween season, and the opera’s visual elements will take advantage of it.
Foremost will be the costumes, which will use the steampunk aesthetic. That style envisions what a futuristic “mad scientist” might dress like in the 1800s – creepy goggles, apparatuses and devices that give mechanical capabilities to “improve” on the human form.
Lighting and background projections will further enhance the spooky atmosphere.
Brian Palumbo of Geppetto Costumes in Struthers created the costumes.
Moving up the show date will also take it out of the thick of the fall theater season, when the schedule can be crowded.
“Rather than being in November, when the ‘Nutcrackers’ and school shows and holiday parties are in full swing, this puts us at the beginning of the season, when there won’t be a lot of competing events,” Skiba says.
The opera company is encouraging audience members to arrive in Halloween costume – or steampunk attire – for the show and its afterparty at Penguin City Brewing. The afterparty will have a steampunk theme, says Denise Glinatsis Bayer, chairperson of OWR.
“Faust” is a great introductory opera for novices, she says, because the plot is familiar to just about everyone.
This year has been financially challenging for OWR because of funding cuts, and Bayer hopes “Faust” will introduce new audiences to opera.
Steampunk Concept
Skiba first cooked up the steampunk concept for a production of “Faust” he directed seven years ago. It’s used to heighten the character’s transformation from old to young in a visual and believable way.
OWR’s production is set in 1880 Germany.
Faust has lived a long and distinguished life, but curses God because his age is getting the better of him.
The devil soon arrives and the two strike a deal wherein Faust is made young again, and the devil gets his soul.
That moment of transformation is the biggest challenge of the show, Skiba says.
“It’s on stage, in front of everyone,” he says. “Faust goes from an old man to a young man in an instant.”
The steampunk look also plays into the character’s identity: a scientist who is arrogant enough to believe that he can improve on humanity.
“We start off with Faust in a wheelchair with hoses and tanks and tubes and machinery that he could have invented,” Skiba says. “I thought, ‘What if Faust used that technology to keep himself alive?’”
The director likens the look to that of Dr. Loveless, a character in the 1999 film “The Wild Wild West” played by Kenneth Branagh.
The apparatuses are quickly removed in the dramatic transformation.
“He’s able to shed those things and literally stand up out of the chair and leave all that stuff behind,” Skiba says. “It puts us in an interesting place with the Industrial Revolution, and the schism between the sacred and the secular. Humankind looking to… outsmart God. That’s paramount and central to the story.”
The cast of OWR’s production features Jonny Kaufman in the title role and Erica Petrocelli as Marguerite, his beautiful young love interest.
James Eder plays Mephistopheles, Brian Keith Johnson is Valentin (Marguerite’s brother), Aidan Eddy is Wagner, Beth Satariano is Siebel and Rachael Pavloski is Marthe.
Kaufman played Don Jose in OWR’s 2023 production of “Carmen.”
Powerful Score
The music Gounod wrote for “Faust” helps drive home each scene. It not only delineates each character but matches their mood, says OWR music director Wyner.
“Perhaps most striking is how Gounod presents the devil,” Wyner writes in her notes on the production. “All fire and brimstone he is not. A shape shifter, Gounod’s Mephistopheles is debonair, witty, charming, wily, sympathetic, a man about town. So, when his dangerous, ferociously cruel side emerges, he is even more terrifying.”
The orchestration paints the devil as strange and mysterious, with switches of harmony and full blasts of brass.
The title character gets similar treatment.
“Faust – musically transformed from a tired, desperate old scholar into a vital young man – vividly emerges from Gounod’s pen with soaring vocal lines,” Wyner writes.
But it is the musical depiction of Marguerite that is the most heartfelt, according to the music director.
“The vocal lines, with their rhythms and their orchestration, move us from a halting, innocent young girl, to the passion of a young woman in love, to disillusion, despair, murder of the child she bore Faust, madness and finally salvation,” Wyner writes.
Tickets for “Faust” can be purchased in advance at the DeYor Performing Arts Center box office, 260 W. Federal St., downtown; by phone at 330 259 9651; and online at OperaWesternReserve.org. The performance will start at 7:30 p.m.