Since moving to the intimate, comfortable, and technically outstanding Alice Busch Theatre in 1987, Glimmerglass Opera has maintained an increasingly high musical standard while offering some of the most theatrically innovative and satisfying opera productions in the country. Festival rehearsal conditions and the presence of a strong Young American Artists program predispose Glimmerglass to adventuresome programming in both baroque and contemporary directions. The 1999 festival centered on the world premiere of a triptych of works co-commissioned with the New York City Opera (NYCO) and WNET/Great Performances. Central Park proved a true pièce d'occasion. If hardly compositionally distinguished or a lasting contribution to the repertory, these three short operas emerged in Mark Lamos's dynamic production as a stimulating evening of theatre and a cannily calibrated celebration of the company's strengths as it achieves synergy with City Opera.

Indeed, the very nature of the project bespeaks sophisticated marketing savvy. The vast publicity afforded the trilogy inevitably centered on the three librettists, not only accomplished and celebrated playwrights but virtual iconic embodiments of the three demographically key elements of Glimmerglass and NYCO's core audience: affluent Jewish New York Times true believers, upper class WASPs, and well-heeled gay white men. Rarely since the court entertainments of the seventeenth century can opera have been so conceptually flattering to its intended audience. Most of the characters and events depicted onstage reflect, to a degree rare in opera, the ostensible concerns and semiotic vocabulary of the theatre's patrons.

Although the production incorporated some sexually ambiguous looks and two apprentice artists of color in minor roles, the scripted vision of Central Park is a Giulianian utopia of unalloyed straightness and whiteness in which Greek Americans figure as the (relative) Ethnic Other. Only in class terms does the picture vary slightly: in Strawberry Fields A. R. Gurney's starring dowager and graduate student briefly argue over a bench with what must be termed “an uppity proletarian,” and Terence McNally puts a homeless mother at the center of The Food of Love. However, in so doing he dangerously yielded the solipsistically inclined diva Lauren Flanigan the opportunity to undercut any intended social criticism. The casting throughout the evening, however, was uniformly strong. Lamos has shown consistently at Glimmerglass his talent for fashioning believable onstage communities and deploying the company's talented apprentice singers to great advantage. Michael Yeargen's stark but strongly achieved set, with potted trees and a video monitor displaying the unpeopled landscapes of Vaux and Olmstead's great urban creation, deftly underlined the irony of creating this portrait of Manhattan's heart amidst the lushly manicured rural comfort of Cooperstown.

Wendy Wasserstein and Deborah Drattel's The Festival of Regrets served as an ice-breaker for an audience tensely anticipating an encounter with contemporary opera. Within minutes, references underlying Wasserstein's boulevard humor flooded the stage (to Brearley, Starbucks, Prufrock, and the like), convulsing many spectators. The author disarmingly observed at a festival symposium that the line, “I'm a senior at Dalton,” would not draw laughter in a play but sounds funny in the context of operatic music. Indeed, her modestly bittersweet interplay of archetypical characters helps distract from the limited charms of Drattel's percussive score, here quite lacking in the rhythmic snap and daring abandon of the klezmer music to which it often draws critical comparison. The awkward musical prosody caused particular vocal problems for Flanigan, who nevertheless gave a comically brilliant physical performance. The most effective blend of music and text came (aptly) in the moving ensemble in which the leads cast their regrets upon the waters (here the orchestra pit). The final coupling-off of characters, however, stretched credulity.

Credulity stretched further in Gurney's nakedly sentimental tale of a sweetly daft Old Lady in furs mistaking a park bench for her subscription seat at the Old Met. With the help of a young male figure out of Tennessee Williams, the piece sinks into perhaps the most sanitized image of parental death since Cocoon. The sensibility throughout seems drawn from the 1980s, with caricatured heartless yuppie offspring, references to a “stereo,” and teenagers making pilgrimages to honor John Lennon. Michael Torke's music, unflatteringly set for his protagonist, rarely rises above syrupy arioso; the exception, once again, is a clever concerted ensemble in which the lovely Margaret Lloyd as the uncaring Daughter shines musically even while twittering about her “fitting at Bergdorf's.” And yet Strawberry Fields works. Drenched in autumnal light supplied by Robert Wierzel (Glimmerglass lights brilliantly), the power of identification, coupled with the easy charm of Jeffrey Lentz and a radiantly engaging central performance by Joyce Castle, palpably drew the audience in. Castle scored the triumph of the evening.

One feels gratitude to McNally for introducing, if only in a fairly resistible Marian allegory, some serious urban issues (homelessness, police brutality, evaporating support for social justice). The times of day flashed on the television monitor added to the sense of urgency in Robert Beaser's effective score, the most musically sophisticated of the three as well as the most attentive to word values. The Food of Love presents intriguing images for the inequities and contradictions inherent in New York life—zoo animals regularly fed, but not homeless children. Again, the ensemble cast performed small miracles of sharp characterization. But an element of self-regard in both the libretto and the leading performance loosened the demand that Lamos's imagistically rich staging and Stewart Robertson's tautly responsive orchestra made on the audience's sympathy.

Central Park played in the vastly larger space of the New York State Theatre during its November City Opera four-performance run. The company might well schedule more performances, as the new operas have attracted considerable buzz in the city whose many-textured life they celebrate. Fortunately, the PBS broadcast taped at Glimmerglass will present to millions a compelling introduction to this questing and often dazzling company.