If an opera company season can be viewed in sequential narrative terms, when we last visited Opera Santa Barbara (OSB), the encounter ended with a real cliff-jumper. A tortured Tosca leaps off a parapet/scaffolding to her death. Curtain falls, in more ways than one. That was then; that was Puccini. Last Sunday’s second installment of the OSB season, at the Lobero Theatre, radically turned the emotional tables, with a giddy Rossini romp of a comic opera.
In La Scala di Seta (The Silk Ladder), our heroine, Giulia (the radiant Santa Barbara–bred Jana McIntyre, in magnificent voice and sharply comic-timed form), is a young love-finagling schemer rather than a tortured soul. She first appears on the upstairs landing of the shop set, by the window that is the site of the fateful “silk ladder” upon which lovers (one intended, one not) will hoist themselves.
The one-act, one-location comic opera is built around a bizarrely complex plot, which may be best unraveled as we sink into the rich atmosphere of the musical element and a livewire production. Singing and acting were ideally pitched to the farcical challenges at hand, especially from suitors Christian Sanders and Matthew Peterson, jester figure Efrain Solís, and beauty-in-disguise Christina Pezzarossi.