Colonial Ingénue Meets Modern Ingenuity

Colonial Ingénue Meets Modern Ingenuity When the Dock Street Theater opened here in February 1736, Heavy duty tarps it was ahead of the Colonial curve: “the first purpose-built theater building in America,” according to publicity materials of the Spoleto Festival USA (though some scholars see the history differently). But it was already playing catch-up in Charleston.

A year earlier the British ballad opera “Flora” had been presented in the Charleston Court Room, “the first time a musical play of any kind was performed in the American colonies,” to quote the festival again. But “Flora” soon found its way to the Dock Street Theater, in December 1736, and returned often.

So it was an inspired idea for the festival to mount a production of “Flora” on Saturday evening to celebrate the reopening of the current Dock Street Theater (a 1937 copy built on the site of the long-gone original) after a three-year renovation. More easily inspired than done, for the work has not come down in a readily performable version. Heavy duty tarps

In a ballad opera, airs, often sung to popular tunes of the day, alternated with spoken dialogue. For “Flora” the libretto survives, along with at least two versions of the score. But those diverge in ways large and small, and even when the differences are reconciled, gaps remain.

The task of making “Flora” stageworthy fell to the composer Neely Bruce, a professor of music and American studies at Wesleyan University. In addition to ironing out discrepancies between the scores, he composed when he had to, supplying instrumental accompaniments, a missing song, an overture and other music to keep the work flowing.

And he did a remarkable job of it, evoking the musical world of the 18th century without aping period practice slavishly. Purcellian strains occasionally pop up amid the sounds of instruments that would have been available in Charleston in the 1730s or, in the case of the guitar, 1740s.

The rest of the production is of similarly high quality. The director, John Pascoe, shows a basic respect for a simple tale that could easily lend itself to kitsch or camp.