Robert Ward’s neo-romantic music in his opera The Crucible drives the disturbing plot about the Salem witch trials with deceptive but unrelenting vigor. Director Francesca Zambello’s Washington National Opera production, first presented at the 2016 Glimmerglass Festival, eliminates the chorus and scales back the orchestra without diminishing the opera’s intensity. Zambello’s goal was to fit the opera to a smaller venue. This helped at Lisner Auditorium, where the cramped orchestra pit could not accommodate the entire orchestra, and brass and percussion instruments had to play in a separate room.
The Crucible is based on Arthur Miller’s play by the same name. The play was written in response to the McCarthy Era “Red Scare.” Ward’s opera premiered in 1961 and won a Pulitzer Prize for music in 1962. The story, set in 1692, concerns the Puritan witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts, and the role John Proctor’s infidelity with a young woman named Abigail Williams played in the town’s hysteria that led to hangings, including that of Proctor. The source of the hysteria was a group of young women, led by Abigail Williams, who were caught dancing in the forest by a town elder. Their fun turns into fear because Puritans punished those who danced. One girl blacks out and takes to her bed, another (an enslaved servant) is forced to confess, and the town elders then suspect witchcraft. To deflect suspicion from themselves, the girls begin accusing various adults of witchcraft. Smitten with John, Abigail seizes this opportunity to say John Proctor’s wife Elizabeth is a witch.
The structure of the opera unfolds in four acts, moving seamlessly from the Parris’s house, the Proctors’ farmhouse, the courthouse, and the jail. The original lighting design established by Mark McCullough primarily provides the transition between places and times and, thereby, eliminates the need for curtains to drop or scenery to be changed. The effect is close to what happens in film when scenes dissolve one into another. It also adds to the emotional urgency of each scene.
With so many characters in the cast, the mise en scene is crucial to how the audience follows what is happening. For example, Zambello’s arrangement of cast in the court scenes where the young women costumed in long dresses of assorted pastel colors initially seem like a spring still life, especially in contrast to the men who wear dark or earth tone colors. When the young women act out, as if under the spell of witchcraft, they grab attention from the men who recede into shadow.
Zambello assembled an able cast led notably well by mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges as Elizabeth Proctor and bass-baritone Ryan McKinny as John Proctor. It also featured a number of current or former Cafritz Young Artists.
Robert Ward’s The Crucible ends with John Proctor refusing to confess to witchcraft and to implicate other people to save his own life. Ward’s opera offers an immersive experience, rather than conventional operatic entertainment. In the political climate that Americans are currently suffering, the message about standing up for truth brought the WNO audience to their feet for a rousing ovation.
Celebration abounds for Washington National Opera—2026 marks the WNO 70th anniversary. Francesca Zambello who was just inducted into Opera America’s Opera Hall of Fame, is bringing attention to the United States which is celebrating its 250th birthday through three very different American operas that reflect political concerns of our time—Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha, Robert Ward’s The Crucible, and Leonard Bernstein’s and Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story.
West Side Story will be mounted May 8, 9, and 10 at Lyric Baltimore and May 14 and 15 at The Music Center at Strathmore in Bethesda, Maryland.
Karren LaLonde Alenier
