In Series Artistic Director Timothy Nelson opened the 2025-2026 season in Washington, DC, with a spectacular operatic adaptation of Alessandro Stradella’s oratorio San Giovanni Battista (St. John The Baptist). The production uses a new English adaptation of the oratorio in a libretto by Bari Biern. This clever recasting of the story changes the setting to America in the 1970s, with a text peppered with current day F-bombs like fascist, felons and frauds. The action on stage supported by Stradella’s sumptuous, authentically performed 17th century music, is head-spinning. One is hardly prepared for the aggressive kisses planted on the mouths of seemingly unlikely partners. Nelson steers the carefully chosen cast of performers who excel both in the delivery of musical prowess and acting acumen with sure-handed confidence to present an edge-of-the-seat show.
The story of this two-act opera loosely follows the Biblical tale and the text of Stradella’s oratorio. For the 1675 oratorio, a castrato sang the role of John. In modern productions of Baroque operas, castrati roles are usually sung by countertenors—male singers with an unusually high vocal range—in this case, Daniel Moody. Costume designer Oana Botez has him dressed in cowboy attire, setting audience expectation for a macho character that is quickly challenged when John sings at the opening of the opera.
Herod and Herodiade present initially as a conventional married couple. She shows him her love by baking him a cake and slathering it with thick icing. John arrives at Herod’s home, interrupting his birthday party. Herod as sung by bass-baritone Andrew Adelsberger plays the absolute counterweight to make these opposites attract. He’s overweight and set in his ways, but he can be manipulated. To put more punch into John’s dominance over Herod, this interloper tells the birthday boy that his wife Herodiade (soprano Hayley Abramowitz) is having an affair with Herod’s counselor brother (tenor Gregory Sliskovich).
Later, we learn that Herodiade genuinely laments the loss of her husband’s love. Herod has focused his love on his daughter Salome (soprano Dawna Rae Warren), telling her that he will give her anything she wants. Salome is nothing like the sexual woman depicted in other versions of the story. In this opera, she is a little girl who greets her father when he arrives home by jumping into his arms. However, she is also the little girl who sadistically cuts the head off her Barbie doll. Her mother, jealous of the attention Herod gives John, eggs on Salome to demand John’s head. When Salome asks her father for John’s death, she transforms into a raging demon. Warren’s performance is terrifying.
Counselor could be merely the guy who seduces the main man’s wife, but Gregory Sliskovich’s Counselor is an unforgettable character, quirky in the way he dances when no one else does and in the way he shrugs and twitches.
The set for this production is populated with bean bag “chairs,” a lava lamp, a color television which is part of a clunky console that includes a record turntable on top, and a cage in which an adult cannot stand up, something akin to those Vietcong cells described by American soldiers imprisoned in the Vietnam War.
The orchestra consisted of early music specialists playing period instruments, matching
the professional artistry of the singers to provide a lush Baroque musical backdrop for the performance.
The production moves October 10 through 12 to Baltimore Theatre Project.
Karren LaLonde Alenier
