Russ Rowland

Sara Holdren’s Master and Margarita-inspired modern dress production deftly carries us across Goethe’s story—from Faust’s fall to Marguerite’s ascension—with sharp pacing, clever staging, and rakish, fun-sized new arrangements. The production includes recitative in modern English that thunders the story forward through a score that can sometimes lack in emotional range.

Shot through with thick lashings of modern sass, even while much of the music expresses the same (sometimes squishy and dated) sentiments over and over with barely discernable difference, this subtly tongue-in-cheek production demanded and received my sharpest attention.

Bass-baritone John Taylor Ward as Mephistopheles stole the show in his tight red suit and corset, a long feather quill (for consigning one’s soul to hell) dangling suggestively out of his cap. Emanating friskiness and good cheer, his warm, rich voice and springy, peakockish movements put me firmly in the devil’s corner.

Between Taylor Ward and Orson Van Gay II’s weepy, moon-eyed Faust, we’re treated to a demi-monde buddy comedy in the first Act that sadly gives way to a drippy, moralizing romance. Fortunately, Rachel Kobernick as Marguerite blasted the house down with some of the show’s only moments of operatic frisson.

It was unfortunate that this production relied so heavily on singers’ acting skills, the limited range of which made for some long and wooden spoken scenes, though the wooden acting of her co-stars was a good foil to Eliza Bonet’s Martha, performed as a bawdy, gum-snapping Fran Fine type. While the caricature is overbroad by a mile for this production, I am always for female satyr characters, whether it’s Bonet’s Martha from Queens or Connie the Hormone Monstress in Big Mouth.

Mezzo soprano AddieRose Brown as Siebel (performed as a female character rather than a trouser role) had a bright and vibrant voice and her acting was soulful and context-appropriate. Alex DeSocio gave a stubbornly angry Valentin and Brandon Bell brought the ensemble together as Wagner, the slaphappy drunken soldier.

Russ Rowland

As in this season’s Salome at Heartbeat, there is a through-current of urgency; Heartbeat makes a case for the miniaturizing of grand opera, through edits and avant gardism, to keep the artform intact for future generations. Instead of lavish sets and thunderous choruses we get shadow puppets, a paper dollhouse aglow and whirling, and broad, modern characterizations.

Holdren’s production throws everything in there and the quirky additions, while hit or miss, are so earnestly attempted and so innocently presented it’s hard to judge them too harshly. Who else is going to put on a production of Faust as an opera about toxic masculinity? The show creators have tried very hard to modernize Gounod and keep our attention and, despite some clumsy additions, they are mostly successful.