Puccini’s Tosca – Opera Santa Barbara – The Santa Barbara Independent

Under James Marvel’s brilliant direction…Puccini’s Tosca has never seemed more real and more horrifying. As Tosca, weeping in Scarpia’s office hears Cavaradossi’s cries, a painting on the wall behind her gradually becomes transparent…becoming a window into the next room, where her lover is being tortured. Great art makes human suffering and brutality visible again, and just in time. Still, beauty is the real point of it all…and Opera Santa Barbara’s production gives us real beauty, even as we weep for poor Tosca.

– The Santa Barbara Independent, James Donelan