“Well, Peter Kazaras, artistic director of Seattle Opera’s Young Artists Program, has worked magic before–in last season’s Falstaff, most notably – and he worked it again in this wonderful production. Eschewing the more obvious enchantments of Colette’s libretto, to focus instead on the surreal qualities of the story, he made L’Enfant more universal than ever, liberating it, as it were, from the outward trappings of one particular French-bourgeois context. The customary nursery-age infant was replaced by a rebellious teenager, and the putative animals by humans with mildly animal characteristics. It was the kind of directorial intervention that I usually find counter-productive. But Kazaras, it’s no exaggeration to say, is a genius of a director, and when he does it, it works.”