Gina Galati’s wonderful Winter Opera company continues its 17th season with Puccini’s Manon Lescaut. This work, which opened in 1893, was Puccini’s first great hit. It was rather daring of Puccini to present this piece, based as it was on a novel that had already been adapted to opera by two other composers first by Daniel Aubert (1856), and then in a hugely successful work by Jules Massenet 1884. But it was an archetypically operatic story an emotional tug-of-war between a rich old man and a poor young one for the affections of a beautiful young woman (viz. La Traviata, La Rondine, Don Pasquale, et alia).
“Life Sucks” featured a small cast, but managed to bring comedy and realism to the stage with a modernized adaptation of “Uncle Vanya,” a 19th-century play.