‘The Elixir of Love’ @ The Dallas Opera
Photos by Kyle Flubacker
—Wayne Lee Gay
The plot is thin—but the the staging delightful, the music engaging, and the singing nothing short of glorious. The Dallas Opera opens its 2026-2027 season this week with a production of Donizetti's The Elixir of Love, the comic opera hit of 1832.
Singing is, after all, the main point of opera. And the operas of Donizetti and his early-nineteenth-century Italian contemporaries Bellini and Rossini require a special type of singing: fluid, beautiful of tone, and very showy, with the singer's skills demonstrated in rapid-fire runs, trills, sustained phrases, and numerous strategically placed high notes. In this current Dallas Opera production, American tenor Anthony León and British-born soprano Soraya Mafi both answer Donizetti's demands with superb performances, as they share the spotlight in the leading roles of Nemorino and Adina, a pair of would-be lovers who play out the old game of romantic hide-and-seek—with many a twist and turn on the way to the happy ending.
Besides an appealing tone quality matched with impressive stamina and flexibility, tenor León leaps about the stage with ease, while convincingly conveying the lovable gullibility of his character. Soprano Mafi matches León's vocal finesse, while bringing a slightly different edge to her character. Both own Hollywood-level good looks.
Romanian baritone Mihai Damian brings a domineering (but still comical) presence along with a magnificently resonant tone as Nemorino's rival. Italian baritone Alessandro Corbelli owns the stage as the wily con man and traveling snake-oil salesman Dr. Dulcamara. American soprano Kayla Nanto is likewise superb as Adina's gossipy sidekick Giannetta. An assertively precise chorus, trained by Paolo Bressan, also holds a significant presence.
Of course, by about eight bars in we know how it's going to turn out, with comical machinations and impossible coincidences flowing relentlessly and humorously to the happy ending. Ashley Martin-Davis' sets and costumes, originally designed for Santa Fe Opera, move the action from the original setting of an unnamed French village (at some vague point in European history) to an Italian village in 1945, with American troops under Sergeant Belcore arriving in a jeep, to the cheers of newly liberated villagers waving American flags.
Instead of being just a peasant, Nemorino is now an auto mechanic with a hot little sports convertible; the notary is a motorcycle-riding priest, and Adina, rather than a prominent landowner as designated in the original version, is a schoolteacher. Donizetti's peasants are still, well, peasants.
The thin plot provides director Stephen Lawless and set and costume designer Ashley Martin-Davis with a perfect canvas on which to impose new whimsicalities, along with sight gags and, occasionally, mildly PG-rated visual jokes. A large panel behind the action serves alternatively as a landscape backdrop, an indicator of weather, and, sometimes, a billboard for commercial olive oil. The overall effect, though historically anachronistic, matches the generally cheerful, sentimental character of Donizetti's score; Spanish conductor Guillermo Garcia Calvo holds all together magnificently with the Dallas Opera Orchestra in top form.
The result is an unfailingly entertaining theatrical and musical experience. Is it profound? Not exactly, except in the sense that solid early romantic music and wonderful singing are in their own right profound—and that human beings are foolish, fall in love, and somehow muddle through.
WHEN: October 8 and 11 (matinee), 14 and 17, 2026
WHERE: Winspear Opera House (Flora St.), Dallas Arts District
WEB: dallasopera.org
