- Todd Rosenberg
- Brian Jagde as Mario Cavaradossi and Tatiana Serjan as Tosca in Lyric Opera’s production of Puccini’s Tosca
On January 12, Lyric Opera general director Anthony Freud announced that Misha Didyk, the Ukrainian tenor scheduled for the leading role of Mario Cavaradossi in Puccini’s Tosca had dropped out of the production “for personal reasons.”
The production, on the other hand, directed by John Caird and commissioned for Houston Grand Opera when Freud was there, is as dark and gloomy as the opera is tragic. It plays out in a big gray box, with costumes that confusingly place Tosca in a future historical context, nearly a century ahead of its setting amid political corruption in Rome in the year 1800. A painting that’s an important first-act prop looked weirdly anachronistic. And the villain of the piece, Scarpia (bass-baritone Evgeny Nikitin), who can steal the show, doesn’t.
