Opera Returns to Downtown Front Royal: Full Houses Both Nights!

Nights at the opera last Thursday and Friday attracted full houses both nights at the attractively refurbished Osteria Maria Italian restaurant, now under new management along with its new name.

Local classical music soprano Melissa Chavez, well known throughout the area for her voice at places of worship, concerts, weddings, funerals, and family celebrations, led this reprise of a handful of pre-pandemic opera nights – personally presenting the two-night extravaganza. The singing was accompanied between acts of “La Traviata” by a four-course Italian/French menu selection presented by restaurant owner Cristina Vignola and chef Blagio Vignola. Delicious was the verdict at our table.

File photo of soprano Melissa Chavez and accompaniment from a pre-COVID season (2019) presentation of La Boheme. Below is the Osteria Maria site of the return of opera to Front Royal, where Rt. 340 and Rt. 55 intersects on the south side of town.

For the occasion, Chavez conscripted two singers, Nicholas Carratura, tenor, and Jose Sacin, bass-baritone, from Washington’s National Opera, and pianist David Edward Adam. All supported her lead role as the lovelorn and dying Violetta in grand style and virtuoso performances that rivaled the best operatic performance I have witnessed in New York and London’s West End theaters.

Chavez, incidentally, was recently appointed to the voice faculty at Shenandoah University and earlier was named Artistic Director of the newly created Valley Chorale.

As for a possible repeat appearance of last week’s quartet, local opera fans must wait awhile. January 2024 is being eyed as a possible time, the place – Osteria Maria – being the same.

Looking south along Route 340 from the Osteria Maria parking lot at the restaurant, which is closed from Sept. 2 through Sept. 27 for a ‘summer holiday’.

(Malcolm Barr Sr., our contributing writer, added to his journalistic qualifications early in life as a movie, stage, and restaurant critic, later joining The Associated Press and serving the world’s premier news service in the mid-Pacific and Washington, D.C. as a “beat” reporter at the U.S. Department of Justice.)