Events

I happened to have seen The Music Shop by Richard Wargo down in Philadelphia at the Academy of Vocal Arts, although it has been well over 18 years by now. Nickel City Opera is presenting this very special show on Sunday, November 19 at 4pm at the Nichols School’s Flickinger Performing Arts Center.

Wargo, the current curator of the Marcella Sembrich Museum in Bolton’s Landing, New York and the artistic director of its summer music program, is a delightful composer who is not afraid to incorporate melody into his creations. More recently Wargo received permission to adapt the writings of playwright Brian Friel and had his adaptation of Lovers, entitled Ballymore, premiered at the Skylight Opera Theatre in Milwaukee. He is also writing an opera entitled Sharon’s Grave based on a play by John B. Keane.

The Music Shop is the third part of three one-hour operas entitled The Chekhov Trilogy and is the flat-out comedy segment of the three. The first act, The Seduction of a Lady, is a melodrama with a unique prop centerpiece: a piano that transforms into a bed. The second act, A Visit to the Country, is straight serious drama. But, once the curtain opens on The Music Shop, you forget about everything else you have seen up until that point. The Music Shop is Wargo’s masterpiece.

A man, sometime around the turn of the century in Tsarist Russia, goes to a music shop to buy a song for his wife to sing at the wedding of a prince. But he has forgotten the name of the song and his overbearing wife will not stand for him returning home without it. He tries to recollect everything his wife told him before he left the house; he even forces the shopkeeper and his assistant to sing many of the stacks of sheet music in the shop to see if they can locate the melody. After this fails to trigger his memory, he has a hilarious hallucination in which he sees himself attacked by angry peasants (a chorus) led by his angry wife (and the shopkeeper who has transformed into the prince) and put against the wall to be executed—all for the simple crime of forgetting to write down the name of the song he was dispatched to buy.

Nickel City Opera’s production at Nichols is the final performance of a week-long string of shows that began at the Springville Center for the Arts as part of a student outreach program. Sheryl Heather Cohen, a fine-voiced soprano, plays the shop assistant Masha, and Melissa Parks is the fierce wife who haunts her husband’s dreams. The local Metropolitan Opera bass (and general director of NCO) Valerian Ruminski sings the role of Dmitri the shopkeeper, and the spindly, expressive tenor Ubaldo Feliciano Hernandez (who sang the role in New York City for DiCapo Opera) hits it out of the park as Ivan Stepanovich, the henpecked husband.

There is only one performance of The Music Shop. Tickets are available at eventbrite.com (search Nickel City Opera), or by calling 716-222-3969, or at the door with cash or credit cards.