What Charms I See - Opera Orlando's "Acis and Galatea"

On May 22, 2026 I attended an Opera Orlando production of George Frideric Handel's Acis and Galatea at the Timucua Arts Foundation White House.  I very much liked it and I feel like it had a lot of the elements that make Opera Orlando charming and accessible.  Collaboration with local arts organization?  Check.  Fun?  Check.  Great performances? Check. A little irreverent yet sincere?  Check.

I had never heard of this opera and, to be honest, I was only dimly aware of what the production actually was before I arrived.  (Opera Orlando has crossed the event horizon of organizations that I will buy tickets for, sight unseen.)  I've got a lot on my plate this month so I wasn't prepared to do a really deep dive on this but I liked the production enough to at least give a Gallimaufry style list of things I liked and thought were interesting.  (After doing a quick rundown of the story and the production history, of course.)

Background

Acis and Galatea premiered in 1718 at the Cannons Estate in North London.  (Handel was German but spent most of his life in England.)   The libretto was written, in English, by John Gay.  The show's been through a lot of changes, several by Handel himself who adapted it into a three act and then a two act work over the years.

Side note, some of this revising is kind of awesomely petty.  Handel, in retaliation for an essentially unauthorized first public production at Haymarket's Little Theater, turned the one act work into a three act Italian version for his own opera company to perform.

The Handel Hendrix House Museum website notes that his two act English version "became one of his most popular works during his lifetime" and "is the first full-scale work that Handel set to an English language text, and it is remarkable how well he fits this ‘foreign’ language to his always tuneful music."  From what I can find, most modern performances are adaptations of this two act English version.

Hold on, did you see the name of that Museum?

One sec...

...

So Handel lived at 25 Brook Street in London and more than 200 years later, Jimi Hendrix lived next door at 23 Brook Street.   The two residences are now a museum celebrating both men and their music.  What a weird world we live in.  (And boy did I fall down a rabbit hole on this.)

Acis and Galatea is an adaptation of the Greek myth of... um... Acis and Galatea as related in Ovid's Metamorphosis.   The sea nymph Galatea falls in love with the mortal shepherd Acis.  Unfortunately for them the giant cyclops Polyphemus is also in love with Galatea.  In a rage he kills Acis with a boulder.  Galatea turns Acis into a river.   The end.

The Opera Orlando Production

Probably not surprisingly given the size of the room, this production had a small cast and the music was arranged down to a string quartet plus a harpsichord.  (Timucua's founder, Benoit Glazer, did the string arrangement.)  Nathan Cicero acted as music director and conducted while he played the harpsichord.

The singing cast consisted of the three principles, Acis (Ruoxi Bian), Galatea (Alexandra Kzeski), and Polyphemus (Logan Tarwater) and a Greek Chorus played by Kenya Hailey, Meghan Hone, Kristen Soto, Evan Cloud, and Cullen Heuman.   Additionally, Opera Orlando's Artistic Director Grant Preisser served as the Narrator.  (Preisser also did the adapting and I assume wrote all the Narrator's dialog.)

The Narrator served as a guide, commenting on the action, connecting some arias together, and reflecting on the story and its meaning.   His lines were in a modern, conversational idiom (well, most of them were, more on that later) and were often quite funny in a dry, understated way.

The story was set in a pastoral Mediterranean countryside during the heyday of legendary Ancient Greece, a setting evoked by a projection of what looked like it might have been an olive tree on the back wall of the stage and the Ancient Greek style dress and makeup of the characters.   (I have no idea what period appropriate clothing for the time would actually be, but the costumes looked verisimilitudinous to me.)  The only real props were Acis's dagger, Polyphemus's giant walking stick, and the giant boulder that crushes Acis.

The show was one act and clocked in at about an hour.

The Gallimaufry

Disclaimer: Any quotes from the Preisser's narration are going to be necessarily paraphrased as they are from memory after one viewing, but I'll try my best to be as accurate as possible.

• The diegesis was amusingly fuzzy.  The Greek Chorus was aware of and interacted with the audience, Galatea and Polyphemus know the narrator was there, and Galatea at least was aware of, and got annoyed with, the musicians on stage.

This was often funny but it also really fits with the idea, emphasized in this production, that this is self consciously a story being told, and one that is universally applicable to humans across the centuries.  The characters all know they're characters in a story.  They know the audience Is there.  They're in continuity with us moderns who are watching (or narrating).  Love and loss is a tale as old as time, and one we will tell over and over again.

• There were some wonderful duets between Acis and Galatea with some really beautiful harmonies.  This wasn't just a function of Handel's writing; Bian and Kzeski's powerful voices blended really well.  I really liked their last one where the baritone Polyphemus joined in, singing about rage and despair.  It was a great contrast.

• It should not be left unsaid that the Chorus also sounded great.

• A big highlight for me in the singing was the fantastic contrast between the Chorus's rapid monosyllables telling Galatea to cease grieving after Acis dies and Galatea's long flowing vocal lines.  The melodies reflect the lyrics; they're singing past each other.

• Cruising through some of the recordings that are floating around it looks like the part of Acis is usually a male part.  I wonder what adjustments had to be made to make it for a mezzo-soprano.   According to wikipedia the Acis of the revised 1732 version was a male alto castrato.   Ouch.

• I liked how the Greek Chorus, as characters, were wonderfully out of their depth when the story went much beyond the idyllic "pleasures of the plains."  They were terrified of Polyphemus, nervously hiding from him in the audience, and were often confused by the Narrator's more florid passages.  Twice the Narrator spoke in elevated rhymed couplets to Acis and the first time Chorus member Meghan Hone, who was standing right next to me watching the story unfold, sweetly said 'I didn't understand any of that."  (The second time she said something like "Still don't get it.")

• There was a good moment early on when Galatea, singing "Hush, ye pretty warbling quire, Your thrilling strains awake my pains and kindle fierce desire," gets increasingly irritated at the accompanying musicians who keep repeating the same jaunty tune and made her sing her lines again.  She gave a frustrated look to the Narrator and he just shrugged and gestured at them with a "What'd you expect?" kind of look.

The Narrator followed up with "As Galatea was in love, all of nature's perfection just sounded like noise."

• A funny Narrator line:  "To be fair to Polyphemus, and I do want to be fair, he has a cave, sheep, hand curated dairy, and baskets of fruits and vegetables.  In the ancient world this wasn't nothing.   He also killed humans and committed cannibalism.  Galatea was focused on the people eating."

• This was probably a coincidence, but it's a nice casting touch that Ruoxi Bian is short compared to both Alexandra Kzeski and Logan Tarwater, providing a visual contrast between the mortal Acis and the semi-divine Galatea and Polyphemus.

• Another very amusing passage by the Narrator after Acis is crushed to death:  "Love is a fragile thing.  It could be crushed by a boulder, but also by a word, a moment of doubt.  Acis didn't have that, his love was perfect. He just had the boulder."   Preisser delivered that last line with the perfect offhand understatement.

• One technical thing that I thought was really cool was during one of the Chorus songs, when the singers were on stage facing the audience with their backs to the accompanists.  There were frequent longish pauses where both the singers and the chamber musicians dropped out and then they'd all manage to come back in perfectly in time with each other without looking.  After a few rounds of this I noticed that someone would always make an anticipatory inhale just before everyone came back in, so I presume they were using that as the cue.  I wasn't sure if it was Nathan Cicero at the harpsichord or one of the singers.  It was pretty subtle; if I had been sitting any farther away I probably wouldn't have heard it.  It was one of those nearly invisible craft things they make look so easy that you can forget how impressive it is.

• I loved the heartfelt and touching narration at the very end after Acis was turned into the river.  It was something like "Love does not exist without loss.   And it's never gone as long as it is in our memory. The boulders, the obstacles aren't interruptions in the story.  They are the story.  It's my story, and your story.  A story we all tell and re-tell."

• Mythological sidebar: Polyphemus is the son of Poseidon and is the cyclops that gets blinded by Odysseus in The Odyssey.  Nobody loves him, then Nobody blinds him.  He had a tough run of it.

The Timucua White House

It's worth a digression on the Timucua Foundation White House for anyone who might not be aware of this gem of a performance space.  Benoit Glazer and his wife Elaine Corriveau, after years of hosting house concerts in their kitchen, built the White House in 2007.  The lovely brick and wood performance hall is literally their living room.  The space is beautiful and the sound is incredible, both as a patron and a performer.  (I've played there 3 times and it was a joy each time.)

The hall also has an ACS active acoustic sound system which allows one to select between 65 different rooms around the world to emulate.  A while ago, Benoit explained to me that the ACS engineers characterized the room and then programmed in reverb and delay settings that, via small microphones and speakers all around the hall, can enhance the natural acoustics of the room so it will sound like, say, not just a generic church hall, but a specific church hall in Germany.  When describing this before concerts, Benoit will sometimes say "Your butt is in my living room, but your ears are in Hamburg."

These systems are really rare; I think Benoit said that this was the first one installed in the Southeastern United States.  The effect is subtle but really nice.  As I said, even without the ACS the room sounds amazing.

If you live in Orlando, or are visiting Orlando, Timucua is absolutely worth a visit.  Check out their website for their events; they have concerts every weekend.

Conclusion

I hope you've enjoyed this brief (by my standards) review that I just dashed out.  Normally I try to weave together something more elegant and deep but I'm extremely bandwidth limited at the moment.

So in keeping with the slapdashness of it all, I'll just grunt out my conclusion:

Acis and Galatea? Good.

Opera Orlando? Good.

Timucua? Good.

Cheers.

-m