The most obvious model for Cree is SWEENEY TODD; it’s just as grimly glib, but somehow nihilistic where the latter was at most merely cynical. It’s a must for anyone who likes their opera unforgiving.

Merrily is solid enough, perhaps as solid as it’ll ever get; it’s up to the cast, the director, and even the audience to fill in the rest. And everyone and everything onstage at the Ruth Page Center shows precisely why Porchlight Music Theatre has made a reputation as premiere Sondheim interpreters.

While Shark Tank is consistently humorous, only seldom does it make a statement in a way that feels cathartic in the current economic atmosphere.

Here, the ethos is clear: don’t go for realism, go for what is most impressive for the audience to look at. The artistry is evident and sumptuous.

The entire piece is begging for a sense of fun and contemporary flavor in the dialogue to give the viewer some way to relate to the world that is being created for them.

Not a story about elves talking to people, but people talking to people, gathered in close.

So, what is it, then, that brought back The Pearl Fishers from sea and into our opera houses again?

It’s very comforting for the uninitiated to walk into their first musical and hear familiar songs; to watch relatable characters wearing hockey jerseys, resembling real people, speaking casually as real people do every day - combined with a few razzle dazzle dance numbers and stunning set, lighting design and fun aerial stunts.

Mitisek and his creative team seem to channel the askew agitation of German expressionism to bring out the horror of the red tape prison.

Dense as the plot may be, it is a testament to Wagner’s genius not only as a composer but also as a librettist, that at no point in Walküre’s four hour and forty-five minute runtime does the piece seem to lag. It is long because it must be.

Even so, Orphée et Eurydice is still an evening heady with love, loss and promise. Promise not only of creating life, life, life out of despair, but of how this marriage of two institutions may make a happy whole.

In short, the play achieves something remarkably rare for a jazz-inflected musical: the performers sound like jazz singers, not musical theatre singers trying to be jazz singers.