By Cindi Boiter
What a surprise and delight it was on Memorial Day to settle into the pews of Charleston’s historic Dock Street Theatre for the comic opera, The Old Maid and the Thief, and see Columbia’s own Patti O’Furniture addressing the audience in the role of the emcee! Maybe it was seeing a beloved South Carolina icon on the stage, maybe it was the intimacy and familiarity of the theatre, or maybe it was a combination of both along with the humor and easily read superscripts, but for this reviewer, The Old Maid and the Thief offered up the coziest opera production I have ever experienced.
A one-act radio opera written by Pulitzer Prize winning composer and Spoleto Festival USA founder Gian Carlo Menotti when he was just 28 years old, The Old Maid and the Thief was first performed for NBC Radio by the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1939 and adapted for the stage in 1941. Rife with stereotypical characterizations, one has to temporarily suspend one’s sense of social consciousness to thoroughly enjoy the performance and, luckily, this isn’t difficult to do at all. The characters in this production are as comical as they are talented, performing downstage on and off of a raised platform in front of members of the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra, directed by Timothy Myers. The presence of drag maven Patti O’Furniture cross dressing in an exquisitely tailored brown steampunk suit also reminds the audience that even though the characters are dated and the action is set more than eighty years ago, this is still 2026, even in South Carolina.
There are four main characters in the opera in addition to Patti: Miss Todd, an unmarried woman, played by mezzo-soprano Katharine Goeldner; Bob, the thief played by baritone Efrain Solis; Laetitia, Miss Todd’s maid played by soprano Rachel Blaustein; and Miss Pinkerton, Miss Todd’s also unmarried neighbor, played by mezzo-soprano Chrystal E. Williams. While this reviewer does not have the credentials to authoritatively review opera, I can report that the vocals were beautiful to my relatively untrained ears and the two arias performed by Blaustein and Solis gave me chills.
As an unexpected treat for this production, the role of the Foley Operator is elevated as the technician resides in a glass booth downstage left providing the audience visual access to the sound effects required for live radio performances. Two supernumeraries keep the action flowing onstage with hilarious choreography and prop placement meant to cleverly mimic certain actions, like the passage of scenery as characters walk down the street or pile into an automobile together. As the emcee, Patti O’Furniture announces a brief preamble to each of the fourteen brief scenes, proving that in addition to being an excellent public speaker, she is completely at home on the stage whether she is dressing her fellow performers from an ill-placed clothes rack downstage right or joining in the choreography with the rest of the cast. (Note: The position of the clothes rack blocking the musicians and many of Patti’s entertaining antics is my only complaint about this performance.)
Expertly directed by Daisy Evans with set and costume design by Walt Spangler and lighting by Jacob Wiltshire, The Old Lady and the Thief will be performed once more during the 2026 festival, on Friday evening, May 29th at 5:30 pm. If you’re not sure whether you enjoy opera or not, or even if you think you don’t but you know you enjoy a performance featuring hilarious physicality combined with impressively executed vocals and a unique narrative delivery, this is a performance for you. Or if you, like this reviewer, get a kick out of witnessing a beloved member of South Carolina’s arts community take on a new challenge and absolutely crush it, The Old Maid and the Thief is not to be missed.
For Tickets to This and Other Spoleto Festival USA Performances visit SpoletoUSA.org
Cindi Boiter is the founder & executive director emerita of the Jasper Project and the editor of Jasper Magazine