Five stars for Amahl and the Night Visitors — an almost unbearably moving opera

Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors is more than a beautiful chamber opera for the Christmas season; it has a unique place in opera and cultural history. Amahl was the first American opera made for television, commissioned by NBC for a live broadcast Christmas Eve in 1951. After that airing, the opera’s popularity made it an annual holiday staple. It has been filmed several times around the world, but Amahl no longer appears on broadcast TV in the US.

As fine as all those versions were, none of them are like On Site Opera’s production in front of an audience (stage performances go back to the early 1950s), which gets at the meaning of the work and the larger seasonal context in a way that opera productions rarely approach. This production is also intensely, at times even overwhelmingly, moving.

As the name says, On Site Opera puts on site-specific performances — they’ve staged things on docked sailing ships and in the Astor Chinese Garden Court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The site for Amahl is the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in Chelsea, and the simple connection of story to setting is the concept and power in a nutshell.

Amahl is a young, disabled shepherd who lives with his mother. It is shortly after Christ’s birth and they are visited by the Magi, on their way to see the child and looking for a place to rest. Amahl’s mother takes them in, but they are too poor to offer them anything. Yet many gifts will come.

The soup kitchen then is Amahl’s (Devin Zamir Coleman) and his mother’s (Chrystal E Williams) shelter — as the audience is seated, Williams is sitting at a table, silently lingering over the last of her meal. The Magi (Julius Ahn as Kaspar, Joshua Jeremiah as Melchior, Musa Ngqungwana as Balthazar) are immediately recognisable as street people, pushing carts and carrying shopping bags with their possessions. Kaspar wears an LA Kings ice hockey T-shirt; Melchior’s crown is from Burger King. They have no gold, but carefully count out the dollar bills they’ve collected.

This naturalism is a seamless extension of the score (with orchestrations from Menotti’s partner, Samuel Barber), one of the finest examples of Menotti’s lyricism. The singers sound full-voiced in his conversational rhythms, and the combination of fine articulation and resonance from all means each detail of the libretto is clear. Williams and Jeremiah have especially charismatic vocal character. Coleman has sung this role before and, though he is growing up, still has a gentle and clear soprano sound. Geoffrey McDonald conducts, and the chamber orchestra has good balance in this small space, one hears all the colours and voices.

This is the colour and beauty of the poor and the meek, who are going to see their new king. Melchior sings that the Christ-child has “the hands of poverty” and the gifts the Magi are bringing are their most precious possessions, more so than even their cash, which in the most profound Christian sense means nothing to them if it means more to someone else. The shepherds come to celebrate the Magi and bring their own gifts: canned food. Binding site to opera, the chorus includes people who live in supported housing for the vulnerable. The fundamental meaning of the season is alive in the joyous singing from all. This is more than opera: this is real.

★★★★★

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