A FATAL FINALE

Death distracts a diva.

Even in her 20s, opera star Ella Shane realized that her voice would never reach the heights needed to thrill audiences in coloratura soprano roles. So she turned her lyric gifts to pants roles: male characters originally sung by castrati but now, in the more merciful Gilded Age, given to female mezzos to spare male singers from mutilation. And as director of the Ella Shane Opera Company, she enjoys luxuries she never dreamed of growing up as Ellen O’Shaughnessy on New York’s Lower East Side. Her household in Greenwich Village includes her former champion boxer cousin, Tommy Hurley, her excellent cook, Mrs. Grazich, and of course her Amazon parrot, Montezuma. With visits from Anna and Louis Abramovitz, her company’s costumer and accompanist respectively, she feels no need to supplement her cozy world with, say, a husband. What she really needs is a new Juliet once her old one, played by Canadian soprano Violette Saint Claire, dies for real in the final scene of the company’s road rendition of Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi. Ella, who never cared much for Violette, has scant interest in her demise until her cousin Gilbert Saint Aubyn, Duke of Leith, turns up. Violette turns out to be an English noblewoman, and Saint Aubyn turns into a major distraction for Ella, disrupting her fencing lessons and velocipede rides. Unfortunately, her indifference to Violette deprives readers of any reason to engage with the soprano’s death, as Kalb’s series debut devolves into a tepid mating ritual of damsel and duke.

No encore necessary.