Irene Roberts, center, as Offred; Sarah Cambidge, seated at right, as Aunt Lydia
Photo: Cory Weaver, courtesy of San Francisco Opera
San Francisco Symphony's second opera of the 2024-25 season is The Handmaid's Tale, the 2000 opera by Poul Ruders and Paul Bentley, based on Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel. It is stunning, strongly sung and directed, and extremely harrowing.
The photo gives you a good idea of the set at its most austere. It was bleak even when the set was dressed as multiple rooms in the Commander's house.
- Lisa Hirsch, SF Chronicle and SFCV. Note that the publications used photos by different photographers, and they are quite different. The Chronicle's Carlos Avila Gonzalez took photos that are dark and moody; I love them. To my eye Cory Weaver's photos for SFO look more like what you see on stage during a performance.
- Joshua Kosman, his newsletter
- Patrick Vaz, The Reverberate Hills
- Opera Tattler
- Michael Anthonio, Parterre Box
- Harvey Steiman, Seen and Heard International
Related:
- Emily Wilson interviews Irene Roberts, SFCV
- Linda Liu, preview, SF Chronicle
I just wish Ruders wrote more effectively (and thoughtfully) for the voice. You can tell his speciality is orchestral writing—which in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is very good. Yet I found the voice parts repetitive and disconnected from the dramaturgy.
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