Scenic Design

HANDEL'S TOLOMEO

Opera seria in three acts by George Frideric Handel

Directed by James Darrah Black

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra × Long Beach Opera

Performed at Herbst Theater San Francisco CA, First Congregational Church of Berkeley CA, Caramoor Center of the Arts NY.

Tolomeo explores themes of power, identity, loyalty, and enduring love through one of Handel's most
emotionally charged scores. Stripped of power and living in exile under an assumed identity, Tolomeo
must navigate betrayal and shifting loyalties as the political order collapses around him. Sung in Italian
with English supertitles, the semi-staged production incorporates period instruments with theatrical
direction and movement, offering an immersive operatic experience that transports audiences back to
the Baroque sound world that its first audiences would have heard.

Scenic Design by Prairie T. Trivuth

Assistant Director Katya Lynch

Photography by Kristen Loken, Gabe Palacio, and Prairie T. Trivuth

PRESS

"Bringing Charm to the Seriousness of a Handel Opera" — New York Times

"Can a smaller Bay Area orchestra outshine S.F. Opera?This ‘Tolomeo’ says yes" — SF Chronicles

While the introductory recitatives flowed seamlessly into the stream of arias that built Handel’s inexorable tensions stage director James Darrah Black kept the pace emotionally distanced and light hearted, playing with the foamy sea of the initial scenes as real sheets of upholstery type foam, while forcing his singers to step back and forth over a low fence made of a series of neon tubes that crossed the stage. In the last act, Alessando, the evening’s master mind, rearranged the individual elements of the low fence, making an enclosed space that had to be broken out of. He then passed out the mirrorized blocks, now building blocks, to Ptolemy, his beloved wife Seleuce, and to the redeemed-by-love sister and brother Elisa and Araspe, each of whom then placed a block, one atop another, making the stack of blocks — let us say they were Handel’s arias — visually understood as everything being finally in place. Then came Alessandro’s final smile. It was engrossing Handel indeed. — Opera Today