It’s an opera that works well at Glimmerglass, where it opened on Saturday night, July 25th. The 900-seat house puts the audience right in the ghastly waiting room of the unseen Consul, as desperate petitioners wait, and wait, and wait some more for a precious visa that will permit them to flee the country.

Set designer Andrew Lieberman and lighting director Jane Cox have created the atmosphere of the universal office steeped in bureaucracy, complete with tubular metal scaffolding, long narrow tables, and turquoise chairs that are surely hell on the lower back. Mock fluorescent lighting casts a sickly glow over the proceedings.

The stage is divided by the scaffolding into four playing areas. This works well for the scenes in the Consul’s waiting room, less well for the scenes at the home of John and Magda Sorel, the sorely put-upon couple who come to grief at the hands of the state.

The plot is a simple one. John Sorel is a freedom fighter (we are told), battling the state. He flees to a neighboring country. His wife Magda and infant son try to obtain visas to join him in exile. The office of the Consul is unyielding, putting Magda through an endless exercise of supplying documents and more documents.

Finally, John is captured, the baby dies, Magda’s mother dies, and then Magda commits suicide. (This is the one bit of action poorly managed by director Sam Helfrich. If one didn’t know the plot, the conclusion would be unclear as Helfrich has staged it, with Magda sitting alone on stage right.)

The cast was ideal. As Magda, Melissa Citro brought her Wagnerian soprano to the role and stopped the performance in the second act with her aria "I am a woman," when she finally snaps in the face of the unseen Consul’s inhumanity to his fellow man. Ms. Citro is already singing such Wagnerian roles as a Norn and a Valkyrie in major houses. She has a great career ahead of her. See her now.

Representing the Consul is his Secretary, Leah Wool, also a singer with a bright future. She mastered saying "Next" with just the right degree of boredom and derision. Every now and then she allowed her own humanity to peek through the gloom. But in the end, this was a party girl in a form-fitting dress just waiting for 5 p.m.

Robert Kerr was a suitably oily and terrifying agent of the secret police.

The Glimmerglass and City Opera veteran Joyce Castle was perfect as the Mother of Magda and John. Her attempts to make her dying grandson smile were heartbreaking. She is a real pro.

Act two, the most entertaining of the three acts, contains a set piece for a magician, another visa-seeker stuck in bureaucratic limbo. John Easterlin somehow mastered a long and complex series of tricks that delighted the audience and his fellow petitioners. (I think it was a real white rabbit he pulled out of his top hat.) He has a strong tenor voice, but I am willing to bet that he worried more about the magic than the notes. He nailed both.

One of my companions at the performance, Roger Sharp, observed that the Magician must represent the circuses that authoritarian governments sponsor to distract their citizens. It certainly explains why Menotti dropped him into the cast.

Menotti was his own librettist. This is often a mistake because there is no one to edit, and this opera desperately needs editing. It is repetitious and often obvious. It’s a two-act opera pumped up to three.

The music, however, is lyrical when appropriate, ugly when appropriate, and always atmospheric. The young cast had no trouble with it, and the new Glimmerglass music director, David Angus, delivered an accomplished performance in the pit. The Consul will be performed nine times through August 24.

Back to Broadway. While authoritarian states have not changed, the Broadway audience surely has. It is inconceivable that this piece – grim and musically challenging, with nothing approaching "Some Enchanted Evening" in it – could open on Broadway today, let alone run for 269 performances. Broadway is now a place to escape the tyranny, or bungling, of the modern state, not to confront it for three hours.