Review: San Diego Opera opens season with artfully staged ‘Pagliacci’

San Diego Opera kicked off its 2025-26 season on Halloween night, where many audience members at the San Diego Civic Theatre showed up in costume, and  horror movie-style drama unfolded onstage in Ruggero Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci.”

The dark 1892 verismo opera seemed a good fit for All Hallow’s Eve, with its potent themes of jealousy, revenge, betrayal and murder.

Musically, the piece was gorgeously conducted by company Principal Conductor Yves Abel leading the San Diego Symphony in the pit, and the vocal cast was also strong.

But what was most interesting in this production was the staging by director Christopher Mattaliano. He moved the story forward in time from the original mid-1800s to what looked like the 1940s or ’50s, giving the production the look and feel of a classic film noir drama.

“Pagliacci” is the story of troubled commedia dell’arte theater troupe traveling town to town in rural Italy. Written by Leoncavallo as a play within a play, company member Tonio opens the opera by singing to the audience about the story set to unfold. Then he changes character to becomes the instrument of the company’s destruction.

In this production, with sets and costumes rented from Portland Opera, the Civic Theatre stage is mostly bare until the theater troupe rolls onstage in a broken-down truck, bringing life, color and unexpected drama to a quiet, gray town. It’s a visually stunning and thoughtfully imagined presentation, but without a surrounding wall of scenery to bounce the singers’ unamplified voices back into the auditorium, it was sometimes hard to hear the singers.

As Canio, the troupe’s controlling leader who learns that his wife Nedda is seeing another man, Jonathan Burton brings a fiery vocal and emotional range to his tortured character, with shades of fury, menace and grief powering his famous “Vesti la giubba” aria and his theatrically unhinged finale.

Soprano Hailey Clark is a vocal standout as the sympathetic Nedda, alongside big-voiced baritone Eleomar Cuello as Silvio, her lover. Kidon Choi, who has a warm, rich baritone voice, delights in the juicy role of Tonio, the company’s clown who sings the prologue and then baits Canio into taking revenge on Nedda after she rejects his own advances.

“Pagliacci” may be best known for Canio’s first-act aria, but its sprightly overture is also instantly recognizable. The opera also has two nice chorus scenes. Chorus Master Bruce Stasyna’s work with the San Diego Opera Chorus, which in this production includes some children, is exceptional, particularly in the first act’s lovely “Bell Chorus.”

“Pagliacci” plays through Sunday, Nov. 2. The season continues with a one-night-only performance of Damien Geter’s multimedia song cycle “Cotton” on Jan. 16 at The Conrad in La Jolla; Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” Feb. 13-15 at the Civic; Bizet’s “Carmen” March 27-29 at the Civic; and a touring production of Gregory Spears and Greg Pierce’s 2016 opera “Fellow Travelers” July 10-12 at the Balboa Theatre.

San Diego Opera presents ‘Pagliacci’

When: 7:30 p.m. Nov. 1; 2 p.m. Nov. 2

Where: San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Third Ave., downtown

Tickets: $53-$265

Online: sdopera.org