Curtis Opera Theatre and Opera Philadelphia present 'Mahagonny/Medium'

With an ear for neo-Romantic harmonies and an unwavering devotion to earnest sentimentality in his storytelling, Menotti’s works can come across as fusty and dated. Stage director Emma Griffin smartly remedied this by stripping The Medium of its melodramatic trappings, setting the opera inside a brightly colored nightmare-scape resembling the filmic worlds of David Lynch or Kenneth Anger.

Amy Rubin’s scenic design — a cross between a middle-class European parlor and the Red Room from Lynch’s Twin Peaks — felt both familiar and jarring.

Griffin further upped the ante by pairing Menotti’s opera with Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Mahagonny: Ein Songspiel, a musically discursive song cycle that served as a truly offbeat curtain-raiser. Elements of the two works blended together, with characters from each piece appearing extra-narratively, sometimes almost guiding the plot.

Two works, one conversation

On paper, they share little common ground. Weill’s musical language encompasses classical composition, jazz, musical theater, and the influence of Weimar-era German Kabarett. Brecht showed no interest in allowing his audience an evening of passive entertainment.

Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, the opera that eventually grew out of Mahagonny: Ein Songspiel, remains an unclassifiable work — neither fully an opera nor a musical, somewhere between social satire and self-consciously didactic moral tract.

Yet Griffin put the two compositions in exciting conversation. Mahagonny concerns itself with hedonism and vice, offering a cautionary tale about a world built on pleasure-seeking and avarice.

The Medium also deals with greed, as Madame Flora, the titular alcoholic fortune-teller, bilks well-meaning parents while promising communion with their departed children. When Flora begins to experience actual paranormal phenomena, she takes it as a sign of the universe’s displeasure.

The action seamlessly transitioned between the works, with Mahagonny’s cast — tenors Seongwo Woo and Aaron Crouch, bass-baritone Tyler Zimmerman, bass Adam Kiss, and sopranos Ashley Robillard and Sage DeAgro-Ruopp — remaining continuously onstage.

Taut drama

At the performance I attended, DeAgro-Ruopp also sang the role of Monica, Madame Flora’s daughter. Her lovely, light-toned soprano suited Menotti’s high-flying music, although her overall sound lacked resonance.

No such problems greeted Siena Licht Miller’s Flora. Her well-sized mezzo, forceful yet intensely musical, ideally communicated incongruous elements of her character: her hucksterism, her wild temper, her barely hidden psychological dread.

Flora is often played by over-the-hill singers who lean into the role’s gratuitously grotesque characteristics — a choice Miller and the production wisely avoided. As costumed by Ásta Bennie Hostetter in a stylish ‘60s-era dress with strands of beads and a prominent shawl, she vacillated between movie-star glamour and mystic stereotype.

The overall effect suggested The Medium as a taut psychological drama rather than a dime-store potboiler. As tension built and Madame Flora slipped farther away from reality, the production became increasingly dissociative. The silent presence of Mahagonny’s performers, costumed in stoogelike wigs and rugby shirts, added to the sense of terror.

The Medium included notable vocal contributions from baritone Dennis Chmelensky, soprano Tiffany Townsend, and mezzo Sophia Maekawa as the grief-stricken mourners seeking comfort in Madame Flora’s deception.

More notable still was the wordless performance of Kendra Broom as Toby, Flora’s unloved and abused servant. An impressive up-and-coming mezzo in her own right, she proved herself a captivating performer even when shrouded in silence.

Conducting fellow Carlos Ágreda led a complex and intelligent performance from the pit, proving Curtis’s spoils extend firmly beyond their current vocal crop. He balanced the incongruities in Weill’s score with aplomb and treated Menotti’s music with the sensitivity and respect it deserves. The Medium may not return to prominence any time soon, but Ágreda is a name we’ll hear for years to come.