Glimmerglass Times Four (on an Elizabethan Stage)

The Glimmerglass Opera has four productions on its bill this summer, and each employs a shared backdrop: an elegant facsimile of an Elizabethan theater in pale gray timber. In front of that background, the flats and scenery for each opera float in. Operagoers who attend performances to applaud lavish sets rather than the singing and staging may be disappointed by it, but the ingenious device — which is both artistically apt and economical — successfully unifies the quartet under a single theme: operas based upon stories that inspired Shakespeare.