L to R, Mihai Damian as Belcore, Anthony León (background) as Nemorino and Soraya Mafi as Adina in dress rehearsal for the Dallas Opera’s Elixir of Love, at Winspear Opera House on Oct. 7, 2026.
Kyle Flubacker/The Dallas Opera
If you think of opera as all doomed love, domineering meanies, mayhem, suicide and murder — well, that’s not The Elixir of Love. A love triangle has to be sorted out, but no one dies, and even the loser finally bears no grudge.
Opening the Dallas Opera’s 2026-27 season Friday night, at the Winspear Opera House, Donizetti’s toe-tapping, vocally virtuosic comedy was presented in a lively and clever updating. And there was some spectacular singing — including from the chorus, which, prepared by Paolo Bressan, has never sounded so exciting and finely focused.
In our already overstimulated age, the operatic evening was itself overstimulated. As people arrived, what sounded like the orchestra’s warming up was loudly amplified in the lobby. Then the performance was prefaced by a video of new general director David Lomelí and others getting ready for the evening.
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Then Lomelí came onstage to welcome the audience in English and Spanish. All this delayed the opening downbeat by a quarter of an hour — five minutes would have been fine — and then the national anthem was belted out by loudly amplified soprano Haley Sicking. Worst of all was a jazz trio playing in the lobby during intermission. Give our ears and minds a break!
As people were seating themselves, though, a video of rehearsal excerpts was an appealing warmup.
A co-production with Santa Fe and Palm Beach opera companies, this Elixir was previously presented in Santa Fe in 2009 and 2024. Directed by Stephen Lawless, it updates the nominally 1830s rural Italian story to post-World War II times, with occupying American soldiers. Silly dance moves are thrown in here and there — well, why not?
Designer Ashley Martin-Davis supplies a big billboard whose messages and images change as needed, plus rough-planked doors in angled walls and period costumes.
Star of the show vocally was Soraya Mafi, who gave the well-to-do but restless Adina a soprano of generous expressivity and dazzlingly precise runs. And she made what can be a caricature seem genuinely human.
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Anthony León was a delightfully boyish Nemorino, transformed from the usual peasant farmer into a grease-stained auto mechanic. (A bright red in-progress sportscar restoration was almost a dramatis persona itself.) León had the bright Italianate tenor for the role, although I could imagine just a bit more poetry in the famous aria “Una furtiva lagrima.”
Mihai Damian was the pompous, entitled Sergeant Belcore, with an aptly blustery baritone that could smooth over as needed. Kayla Nanto as Giannetta had a powerful if edgy mezzo, but she made the smaller role a real presence. Alessandro Corbelli had the seasoned baritone and comic instincts for the quack peddler Dr. Dulcamara, whose “elixir” is claimed — among other things — to banish bedbugs, cure scrofula, restore youth and add amorous magnetism. But he didn’t always keep up with the role’s rapid-fire patter.
Ensembles large and small weren’t always quite together, although subsequent performances will likely tighten. And while conductor Guillermo García Calvo got alert, nicely inflected playing from the orchestra, at times it could have been a little softer for benefit of the singers.
Details
Repeats at 2 p.m. Sunday and 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Oct. 17 at Winspear Opera House, 2403 Flora St. $15 to $475. 214-443-1000, dallasopera.org.