Wolf Trap Opera's 'Falstaff' is intimate and memorable

It's a luxury to see a big opera in a small theater. There's a sense of extravagance to Wolf Trap Opera's "Falstaff," which opened at the Barns on Friday night. The singers' voices fill the house; while the audience sits close enough to them to pick up on the lift of an eyebrow, or an expression of deadpan confoundedness. "Falstaff," Verdi's final opera, is a chamber opera on a grand scale, and to see it produced in a chamber-opera-size space, with voices that were right for the parts, was a lot...