All Twin Cities theatre companies with fall-to-summer seasons for 2024-2025 have unspooled their wares, so with this review, I officially–and somewhat arbitrarily–present my first review of the 2025-2026 season. The season set sail with a production from Skylark Opera Theatre that took the song cycle The New Seven Deadly Sins, commissioned to be performed by Audra McDonald at Carnegie Hall in 2004, and added dance and staging to transform it into a theatrical event, which recently ran over a brief four-day period. The results were musically sparkling and theatrically engrossing. If it still felt closer to a song cycle than a play, it was a song cycle with a pulse of dynamic staging evoked through the interaction among the artists performing on stage.

The idea of seven deadly sins was formalized in the early centuries of Christianity, though there are antecedents in ancient Roman and Greek writings. The exact names sometimes are altered, but they most often are listed as pride, greed, wrath (which this program labels "anger"), envy, lust, and gluttony. The assembled seven songs in this piece are each by a different composer or composing team.

For Skylark Opera, the seven songs were performed by soprano Bergan Baker, seen in last year's Skylark production of Marry Me a Little. Bergan sang with flawless clarity, and infused each song with a sense of character and purpose, as well as drawing in humor where appropriate. Dancers Patrick Jeffrey and Sarah Potvin used movement to expand on the theme of each song, bringing both grace and muscularity to bear in creating a dynamic personification of each sin in its turn. Throughout the production, dance and overall staging seamlessly flowed together. Choreographer and stage director Nikki Swoboda often had the two dancers interacting with Ms. Baker in ways that amplify the songs into a form of storytelling.

Skylark Opera Theatre's Artistic Director James Barnett served as music director and accompanied the program on piano along with Ian Snyder on violin. The two performed an impassioned prelude before the first of the seven was presented, incorporating strains of impressionist, blues, and gospel sounds. They also provided a bridge between each of the seven scenes with musical interludes. The quality of their performance was exceptional. The show was presented on a bare stage, but Grant Merges' evocative lighting design conveyed constantly apt shifts in the tone and breadth of feeling enmeshed in each of the scenes. Barnett and Swoboda together devised costumes wonderfully suited to each scene, with the giddy apparel for "The Greedy Tadpole" particularly winning.

The song titles, composers, and sins they represent, in the order they are presented, are: "Burning the Sauce" by Steve Marzullo and Mark Campbell (Lust); "The Christian Thing to Do" by Michael John LaChiusa (Lust); "I Eat" by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens (Gluttony); "The Greedy Tadpole" by John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey (Greed); "Blah, Blah, Blah" by Jake Heggie (Vanity); "My Book" by Jeff Blumenkrantz (Sloth); and "Can You Look Me in the Eyes?" by Ricky Ian Gordon (Envy).

Because each composer and lyricist brings a different style and temperament to their respective work, there was an unevenness to the production as we adjusted to the different flavor of each scene. That said, the inclusion of dance, and of interaction among the three performers on stage bolstered our grasp of the message being conveyed, and gave the whole enterprise a theatrical coherence that would be hard to achieve with a single vocalist alone.

Of the scenes, I found "Burning the Sauce" the most forthright in its candid depiction of Lust; "The Christian Thing to Do" the most indirect in its effort to conceal the singer's anger through sarcasm; "The Greedy Tadpole" the most political in depicting how greed spirals into wanton destructiveness; and "Blah, Blah, Blah" and "My Book" shared honors as the funniest of the scenes, depicting Vanity and Sloth, respectively, with Baker demonstrating a sublime flair for comedy. "I Eat" was the most insightful in unspooling the complex relationship with food, and "Can You Look Me in the Eyes?" the most harrowing, as the singer is not a person committing the sin of envy, but is rather envy incarnate, the very force with which a sin can undermine our intentions from good to menacing.

The "New" in the title The New Seven Deadly Sins stands in contrast to The Seven Deadly Sins, a 1933 song cycle by Brecht and Kurt Weil. After the Nazis seized control of the German government that year, both Brecht and especially Weill, a Jew, determined they could no longer make Germany their home. Brecht relocated at that time to Lugano, Switzerland and Weil to Paris. There, he drew a commission from Edward James, a wealthy Englishman whose wife, ballerina Tilly Losch, bore a striking resemblance to Weil's wife and sometimes muse, Lotte Lenya. The commission called for Lenya to sing and Losch to dance the central character. Weil invited Brecht to join him in Paris for this, their final collaboration. The work was a success and has had numerous productions. In any case, the "New" in current work refers to new songs, and not new sins. Sins, sadly, have endured unaltered by time, albeit with new technologies employed along the way.

The New Seven Deadly Sins was presented for only four performances last weekend. Based on the response of those attending in full houses, I would venture a guess that a return engagement at some point would be welcome.

The New Seven Deadly Sins was presented by Skylark Opera Theatre from August 7 through August 10, 2025 at the Crane Theater, 2303 Kennedy Street N.E., Minneapolis MN. For more information, please visit skylarkopera.org.

Music and Lyrics: Michael John LaChiusa, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, Jake Heggie, Jeff Blumenkrantz, Ricky Ian Gordon, John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey, and Steve Marzullo and Mark Campbell; Stage Director and Choreographer: Nikki Swoboda; Music Director: James Barnett; Lighting Design: Grant Merges; Costume Design: James Barnett and Nikki Swoboda; Stage Manager: Alyssa Emily Carey.

Cast: James Barnett (Piano), Bergen Baker (Soprano), Patrick Jeffrey (Dancer), Sarah Potvin (Dancer), Ian Snyder (Violin).