Horace Tabor James Morris
Augusta Tabor Judith Forst
Baby Doe Suzanne Ramo
Mama McCourt Josepha Gayer
William Jennings Bryan John Fanning
Jim Croom, Colby Roberts, Richard Walker, Valery Portnov, David Kekeuwa,
Virginia Pluth, Laurel Rice, Alexandra Nehra, Julianne Booth, Sara Lamar
McBride, Tina Osinski, Philip Horst, Wayne Davis, Jere Torkelsen, Kenneth
Rafanan, William Pickersgill, Claire Kelm, Sally Mouzon, Tom Reed, Kenneth
Johnson, Jim Meyer, Daniel Harper, Alyssa Matthias, Mario Sawaya

It was probably a bad idea to see this piece of Americana in the same week
as the stunning new Dead Man Walking. Baby Doe, which had its premiere in
1956, uses explicitly American forms and melodies with a drop of
compositional self-awareness, in a strongly emotional music-theatre
construction that has a large number of minor roles, including foursomes of

cronies and their wives who comments in chorus on events. But that’s as far

as the similarity goes. Baby Doe seems to be a cold-war era romance of
capitalism where the hero and heroine’s tragedy is that they love the wrong

metallic standard. It’s also substantially a pastiche of the opera and
popular music of the period in which it is set, the 1880s and 1890s, or a
couple of decades later. Someone suggested that it should be called The
girl of the silver west, but Moore’s punching of the sentimental buttons is

more disingenuous than Puccini’s, and a lot less fun.

The San Francisco Opera did its best, putting on an Oklahoma-style
production on a set where the mountains were permanently in the background,

and rustling up a pretty good cast. But even with James Morris and Judith
Forst giving it their best, there didn’t seem to be much there.

Morris was in good voice, and if not exactly a romantic hero at least an
amiable idiot. Forst was scary in her suppressed rage, and finally very
moving in her realisation of total failure. Suzanne Ramo was pretty and
also amiable. She had an incipient wobble that was worrying in one so
young, but was warmly expressive, even though you couldn’t help feeling
there was no reason for her to feel so strongly about either silver or
Horace Tabor. The singers in the smaller roles were well prepared, but they

couldn’t make it interesting.