Anatomy of an opera: How Minnesota Opera’s ’Elixir of Love’ came together

It’s like “Top Chef” or “The Great British Bake Off,” but with opera.

For the biennial Robert L.B. Tobin Director-Designer Prize, directors have about a month to form design teams — set, lighting, costumes — that choose one of 10 operas, develop an imaginative concept for a production of it, draw up designs and present them to a panel of judges.

The competition’s been around since 2009 and, for the first time, one of the winning concepts will find its way onto the stage of a major American opera company with Minnesota Opera’s new production of Gaetano Donizetti’s romantic comedy, “The Elixir of Love.” It opens this weekend at St. Paul’s Ordway Music Theater.

Here’s how it happened.

When the 2021 Tobin Prize process began, director Daniel Ellis was at a particularly low point. So he contacted costume designer Angela Kahler and lighting designer Cheri Prough DeVol.

“When COVID hit, we all lost contracts, like a lot of other artists,” Ellis said between rehearsals at the Minnesota Opera Center in Minneapolis earlier this month. “And I reached out to them and said, ‘Look, I need to work on something.’ This void we were in was really creating a lot of dark space.”

They’d collaborated on a previous Tobin Prize submission that wasn’t among the winners. But they needed a set designer, and Ellis found one in a recent college graduate who’d come highly recommended, Jaime Mejia.

“We narrowed it down pretty quickly to four operas,” Prough DeVol said from her home in Kyle, Texas. “We were looking for edgy things and ‘Elixir’ was different. It was lighthearted. It seemed the kind of thing we could really enjoy working on when things were not awesome around us.”

Costume designer Kahler says she pushed harder for it than anyone.

“I was living in New York City in the middle of the pandemic and, as you know, it got really dark here really fast,” she said. “I just needed something light. And I love the idea of it being a rom-com. Total fluff.”

The team then had two weeks to have everything ready for judges. “The Elixir of Love” is set on a farm owned and run by a woman, Adina. One of her workers, Nemorino, is secretly in love with her. When a huckster passes through selling magic potions, Nemorino seeks a love elixir.

“Jaime, very quickly in the process, started offering conceptual sketches,” Ellis said. “We had a concept in which we had a giant wine vat that opened up and created this locale. For a little bit, we set the piece in a restaurant called Adina’s Garden that looked vaguely like Olive Garden. And then I ended up going down this route that Jaime and Angie wanted to look at in advertising.”

So an orange grove in 1916 California became the setting. Mejia created a set design with a Spanish mission flavor, while Kahler created costumes of the period, when women farm workers started wearing trousers, and Prough DeVol developed lighting designs inspired by the idyllic artwork found on orange crates of the period.

“Then I think we all thought, ‘We’re done,’” Ellis said. “And suddenly we got the letter that said we were chosen.”

The team was among four winners asked to present at the 2022 Opera America conference in Minneapolis. More ideas were added, and the presentation was a success.

“About five weeks later, I got a call from Karen Quisenberry [Minnesota Opera’s vice president of production],” Ellis said. “She said, ‘We would like to do “The Elixir.”’ So I sent out a call to these guys and we all kind of sat on Zoom for a minute and said, ‘What?!’”

What the team thought of as a “paper project” would now become three-dimensional, full of music and the energy of live performance, something they’d been craving during the pandemic. And the team — which was finally united in person for the first time two weeks ago — will take a bow together at Saturday’s opening-night curtain call.

When: 7:30 p.m. Sat., Thu. and Feb. 3; 2 p.m. Feb. 4.

Where: Ordway Music Theater, 345 Washington St., St. Paul.

Tickets: $31-$250, 612-333-6669 or mnopera.org.