Inside the sweetest start to this year's Saratoga summer
The premiere of ‘She Loves Me’ brings romance, laughs and world-class singing to downtown Saratoga — plus free ice cream.
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After a rainy few months, the steamy summer weather held for the premiere of Opera Saratoga’s musical She Loves Me — making the Stewart’s ice cream served in the UPH lobby afterwards extra thrilling. Add in the theater’s local celeb of a director Teddy Foster tending bar, and it all made for a lively, distinctly Saratoga evening.
The audience (and opening night after-party at Franklin Square Market) was a who’s who of the local performing arts scene — think Judy Harrigan, Steve Rosenblum and Eric Rudy, Bob and Marcia Miller, Jeff and Janet Altamari, and Bocage owners Zac Denham and Clark Gale. But the season’s hitting the stage for three mainstage productions right downtown at Universal Preservation Hall means anyone can make a night of it. (She Loves Me has five more performances June 25-29.)
The Tony award-winning show features six main characters surviving varying degrees of romantic success. (In Saratoga, most of the parts are played by the current Festival Artists in town for the company’s summer program.) The main love story is an epic pen pal adventure that leads to a banger of a second act with three of the four biggest hits in rapid succession, including “Ice Cream” (hence the Stewart’s Shop treat).
Due to the aforementioned rain, Saratoga was robbed of its first exposure to these showstoppers, scheduled to go off at the track the day before the Belmont.
“Every one of those singers could be on Broadway right now,” one audience member was overheard saying while exiting the theater. Indeed, many Festival Artists have gone on to Broadway — and the Met, La Scala in Milan, London’s Royal Opera House, Lyric Opera of Chicago... And right now, She Loves Me’s main star, Georg Nowack, is played by the world-class Jarrett Porter, who flew in straight from Frankfurt, where he’s a member of the German city’s opera company.
And let’s not forget the emotional heart of the show, Mr. Maraczek, who’s played by legend Peter Kazaras, a distinguished professor emeritus at UCLA who’s performed at the Met, Glimmerglass and with the San Francisco Opera, for starters.
Opera Saratoga’s rendition of this crowd-pleasing musical seemed extra-exciting, since many in the audience have gotten to know the visiting singers via a series of concerts at the Mansion and Saratoga Winery.
To that point, when the unstoppable Kate Morton sang “Library” about the optometrist “Paul” she met at the…library…she found her table-mate Paul from the recent fundraising gala at Saratoga National and pointed at him in the audience. It was one of many times she wielded her star power and comedic timing.
Christine Taylor Price also shone, as the other half of the lonely hearts club saga, as did Shavan Lloyd as the resident ladies’ man; he always brings the house down. And the ensemble was hilarious — with bonus points to whomever paired up the theatrical Fantine Douilly and Chuanyuan Liu.
“It really reads when they’re having fun up there,” said Laurie Rogers, director of the Festival Artist Program. “I’m so proud.”
This is not a review of the musical She Loves Me. For a review of Opera Saratoga’s operetta, La Vie parisienne, please consider Joseph Dalton’s in the Times Union. Abby Tegnelia is on the Board of Opera Saratoga, but all opinions are her own.
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