In the 15 years since Winter Opera St. Louis was founded, it has never repeated a show. Yet one is frequently requested: The Desert Song.
“We have a traditional audience that really likes classical operetta,” says Gina Galati, Winter Opera’s general director and founder. “We’re not interested in reinventing the wheel with new operas that no one has heard of…We try to give our patrons what they want.”
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While Winter Opera might not be interested in reinventing the wheel, it has reinvented The Desert Song to close out its season on March 3 and 5. The 1926 hit operetta from Sigmund Romberg, Oscar Hammerstein II, Otto Harbach, and Frank Mandel is traditionally a romance that’s set against the backdrop of a conflict between French and Arab forces in Morocco. Locally, The Desert Song was a standard at The Muny for decades. It was performed a dozen times between 1930 and 1979, and staged as a concert 1996.
“It was a huge success,” says David Little, the Ball State University theater professor who revised the show for Winter Opera. “There’s multiple film versions of it; it was done as a radio play. Very frequently it was done, so it’s well-loved and known by people of a certain age, but it’s fallen out of favor.”
Little became involved with Winter Opera St. Louis through Jon Truitt, the stage director for The Desert Song and director of opera and associate professor of music performance at Ball State. Little says Truitt asked him to work on the operetta in October 2022, and he turned in the final draft just three months later.
“The purpose of the new book is to give the female characters agency in their own storytelling, to give the Middle Eastern and North African characters dignity, but also to maintain all of the music and the characters from the original version,” Little says. He also removed any mentions of specific physical locations from the show and turned it into more of a fantasy.
The Desert Song is a monumental production for Winter Opera. “There’s years of training and preparation for the singers, there’s years of experience for me and the technical crew, there’s years of conducting training for the conductor, but it’s all focused on two hours,” Truitt says. “The moment the curtain drops, it’s gone and will never be repeated.”
For her part, Galati is looking forward to seeing the reactions from the theater’s patrons. “Every show we’ve had this season, I’ve heard, ‘We can’t wait for The Desert Song,’” she says. “There’s a lot of buzz about it, and we’re just thrilled.”
The Desert Song, conducted by Dario Salvi and directed by Jon Truitt, runs March 3 & 5 at Kirkwood Performing Arts Center. For tickets, call 314-865-0038 or visit winteroperastl.org.
