On the other side of the Atlantic, the rarity in English Touring Opera's spring season would not be thought a novelty at all: Carlisle Floyd's Susannah, first seen in 1955, has become the most frequently performed of all American operas. If its popularity with audiences and opera companies in the US is easy to understand, then so is its relative lack of success in Britain. The subject matter - the biblical story of Susanna and the elders that appears in the Apocrypha, transplanted to an isolated evangelical community in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee in the first half of the 20th century - is as American as apple pie.
Yet ETO's efficient production, staged by the company's general director James Conway with Alexander Ingram conducting, shows that a major part of the reason for Susannah's success is that it works so effectively on stage. Floyd's folksy score, in which the Copland of Appalachian Spring and The Tender Land forms an unlikely alliance with Puccini's Tosca, is tawdry, faux-naïf stuff. The musical equivalent of Little House On the Prairie, it never takes any dramatic responsibility but only accompanies and adds local colour to the drama in the text. However, that drama is concise and well-plotted, and the central trio of characters at least have real depth and credibility.
It was a mistake in this production to insist that the singers affect southern drawls; after all, we do not expect the cast of Un Ballo in Maschera to have Swedish accents, or Birtwistle's Gawain to be done in Black Country tone. Here, the text is often indistinct because of it.
That apart, the cast is an excellent one. Donna Bateman is a touching Susannah, whose painful journey from innocence to experience is graphically charted. As her alcoholic brother Sam, Todd Wilander squeezes some unexpected sympathy from a fundamentally repellent character. Andrew Slater's Blitch, the fire-and-brimstone preacher who leads the persecution of Susannah after she is seen bathing nude but eventually seduces her, is a wonderfully telling portrait of a fatally flawed hypocrite. They and the rest of the smaller roles, all well taken, make this an opera worth seeing, at least once.
· At the Northcott, Exeter (01392 493493), on Thursday. Then touring until May 15.
