John Rockwell, An English Masquerade Opera At The New York Academy Of Art, The New York Times,  June 29, 1991

With its penchant for ladies (and sometimes gentlemen) in black lipstick, leather jackets and lingerie, the Opera at the Academy is not for every taste.  Like Peter Sellars, its stage directors tend to combine period-correct musical performances with trendily updated productions. The company's latest offering, a series of four performances seen on Thursday night and ending last night, ingeniously combined four late-17th-century English masques with different directors who dressed (or undressed) them in early 1990's club-land attire.

If one wanted to ordain rules for this sort of thing, one might safely suggest that period musical practice should be wed to period stage practice, everything aspiring to freshness under the aegis of authenticity. But rules are perilous in the theater; what is excluded too often turns out to be lively and original. In this case, the results ranged from the silly and awkward to the challenging to the unformed to the quirkily brilliant. Which is hardly a bad batting average for any theatrical experiment.

The quirkily brilliant came last, capping a sweltering evening with John Kelly's production of "Cupid and Death." Composed mostly by Matthew Locke with additional music by Christopher Gibbons and here shorn of its prologue and extensive dances, this is an allegory in which the title figures mix up their arrows, so that the dying are rejuvenated and the amorous slaughtered until Nature puts things right.

Mr. Kelly changed nothing essential. But he added several extra characters (including a wonderfully spidery, censorious Cardinal who switches the arrows and then is made to fall into passionate love with a taunting street urchin) and tricked up everything in the campy guise of Lower East Side performance art. His work was elevated from the tawdry to the wittily Ludlamesque by some truly funny acting, especially by Mr. Kelly himself as Death (he also sang, with a pungent countertenor). Such double takes haven't been seen since Buster Keaton; may Mr. Kelly address another opera soon.

Travis Preston's staging of "Saul and the Witch of Endor" was the most conventional of the night, but simple and telling in a way that didn't get in the way of Purcell's mournfully eerie music. Martha Clarke was to have staged Purcell's short solo scene "The Blessed Virgin's Expostulation," but apparently felt her work unfinished and withdrew her name; it did indeed look unfinished. Christopher Alden's version of John Blow's "Venus and Adonis" conformed most closely to Opera at the Academy cliché’s (or style), with a rather embarrassed-looking Julie Schmidt as Venus stripped to her undies by the end.

Except for Mr. Kelly, the singers were members of the company's training program, and most sounded student-ish, talented and earnest but lacking in developed vocal or dramatic personality.  Principal roles were taken by Jay Taylor, Eileen Frizzell, Daniel Gundlach, Laila Salins, Catherine Schwartzman, Ellen Oxman, Kim Swennes and Belinda Bronaugh, along with Ms. Schmidt. Paul C. Echols led the small instrumental ensemble, and the set for the evening was designed by Serge Becker.