Review: Large, enthusiastic audience turn out for San Diego Opera’s lovely mariachi opera ‘El Milagro’

Over the past decade, San Diego Opera has worked hard to expand its audience, both in age, ethnic, geographic and socioeconomic diversity.

That outreach effort was clearly evident in the audience at Friday’s opening-night performance of “El Milagro del Recuerdo (The Miracle of Remembering)” at the San Diego Civic Theatre.

The 2019 mariachi opera by Mexican composer and bandleader Javier Martínez and librettist Leonard Foglia drew a capacity crowd of both San Diego Opera’s regular, mostly White and older season-ticket holders and a large number of Mexican and Mexican American ticketholders of all ages. I’ve heard lots of crinkling cough-drop wrappers at opera performances over the years but this was the first time I can remember hearing a small child crying in the upper balcony during an opera (which I count that as a positive trend in audience expansion).

“El Milagro” is the third mariachi opera that San Diego Opera has produced since 2013. The first two were written by Foglia and José “Pepe” Martínez, the famous Mexican mariachi bandleader who died in 2016. In his place, his son and fellow bandleader, Javier, composed the score for “El Milagro.”

For those who aren’t familiar with mariachi opera, it’s more mariachi than opera. The music is a rich, melodic and lovely blend of Mexican bolero and ranchero folk music, and three mariachi musician-singers are onstage for the entire 75-minute show. Unlike traditional opera, it’s not sung-through. In between songs, the singers and non-singing children in the show speak their lines and their words seemed to be amplified with microphones.

But unlike mariachi, there is a full-length story being told onstage, and all of the songs are lyrically connected to the plot. Also, San Diego Symphony musicians, conducted in the pit by James Lowe, supplement the score with harp, trumpets, strings and much more. The opera is sung in Spanish with English and Spanish supertitles projected above the stage.

Mezzo-soprano Guadalupe Paz in "El Milagro del Recuerdo (The Miracle of Remembering)."

“El Milagro” is set in 1962, when two Mexican braceros (farmworkers), Laurentino and Chucho, return from the U.S. to their hometown in Michoacán, Mexico, to spend Christmas with their wives and children. Their village is in the midst of rehearsing its annual pastorela, a Christmas play about the shepherds going to visit baby Jesus in Bethlehem, but in the Mexican version of the Nativity tale, the shepherds meet temptations and trials along the way at the hands of Satan, but Saint Michael the Archangel arrives to ease their journey.

Chucho’s wife, Lupita, likes the idea of becoming an “American girl” someday, but Laurentino’s wife, Renata, wants her husband to stay in Mexico with her and their young son, Rafael.

There are layers of hope, loss, loneliness and mystery in the story, including the ghost of a long-departed woman wandering the town’s streets and a pinata shop that materializes out of thin air from Laurentino’s memory. Some of these story elements feel underdeveloped, particularly the unresolved story of Renata and Laurentino.

“El Milagro” was written in 2019 as a prequel to Foglia and Pepe Martinez’s 2010 mariachi opera “Cruzar la Cara de la Luna (To Cross the Face of the Moon).” Local audiences who saw the original opera when it was produced by San Diego Opera in 2013, know that Renata attempted to join Laurentino in the U.S. after that Christmas, but she died along the way. More musical foreshadowing of the fate awaiting her would have enhanced the story, but perhaps because this show was written for a family audience, that and other dark elements of the story were left unexplored.

The opera’s standout musical moment is the milagro (miracle) song by the ghostly woman La Mujer, impeccably sung by mezzo-soprano Guadalupe Paz, who played Frida Kahlo in last season’s “El último sueño de Frida y Diego.” The song has poignant emotional gravitas and long, gorgeous musical lines that she sings with grace and artistry.

Also entertaining were the high note-filled songs sung by tenor Felipe Prado, who plays the Catholic priest Padre Matías producing the pastorela. Mezzo-soprano Sishel Claverie brought a dark soulfulness to the role of Renata; bass-baritone Federico de Michelis is touching as the conflicted Laurentino; tenor Bernardo Bermudez and Houston mariachi and opera singer Vanessa Alonzo offer comic relief as the upbeat couple Chucho and Lupita. And baritone Héctor Vásquez amuses as Aba, the town elder who plays Satan in the pastorela.

The opera’s physical production of a small Mexican town is simple but attractive and beautifully lit. And the special effect of fluttering metal glitter, meant to represent the millions of monarch butterflies that return to Michoacan each year to wait out the winter, is visually stunning. Like Laurentino and Chucho, the monarchs will have to return north eventually, but for now they’re resting with each other for the holidays.