Having watched director Richard Brooks's powerful 1960 film Elmer Gantry as research for catching Opera Santa Barbara's (OSB) production of the operatic adaptation of the piece, I was a bit disarmed by the narrative differences between the two. Alas, the opera telling the story yolks closer to Sinclair Lewis’s groundbreaking 1927 novel than the Burt Lancaster film. But the deeply embedded themes — the fragility of spiritual faith, the lure of religious hucksterism, and MOB mentality in the American grain — remain the same.
It all adds up to ripe fodder for operatic treatment, and OSB is to be commended for bringing this fascinating contemporary piece to our town, and in grand style, turning the Lobero Theatre into a surrogate tent preaching house of cultural worship.
Happily off the grid of familiar crowd-baiting opera standard fare, this opera — written in 2007 by composer Robert Aldridge and librettist Herschel Garfein — is a thoroughly American endeavor, thematically and also musically, weaving together strands of contemporary, classical, natural gospel music strains and musical theater lingos.