Caprice Corona & Charles Fornara. Photo © 2005 by Marisol Díaz.

For its winter production, in January, the Bronx Opera Company revived the relatively rarely heard “The Consul,” Gian Carlo Menotti’s fraught, unfortunately still relevant, Cold War-era melodrama, cloaked in lush, post-Puccinian lyricism, which had its premiere in Philadelphia and played on Broadway for 269 performances in 1950. The opera is set in a totalitarian nation that thrives on menace and bureaucracy. When one reads daily of families rent asunder, visas, passports and benefits denied due to technicalities and red tape, the concerns of “The Consul” hardly seem remote. Bronx Opera gave two performances of the work at the Lovinger Theater at Lehman College and two the following week at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College. The last of these, on January 15, with Artistic Director and Conductor Michael Spierman and Stage Director Benjamin Spierman expertly guiding a high level ensemble, is considered here.

The opera’s leading women’s roles are more finely drawn, more substantial than those of the shadowy male leads. Caprice Corona made a moving Magda Sorel, wife of the fugitive revolutionary, John Sorel. Corona’s effort was a riveting tour-de-force, with her desperate aria “To this we have come,” in which, scattering a blizzard of paper, she attempted to wrest an empathetic response from the secretary to the Consul of the country in which John would seek refuge, and her delirium and suicide scene, when, to prevent John from taking the risk of returning, she turned on the stove in their apartment and waited for the gas to overcome her.

Magda’s formidable nemesis was Julie DeVaere as an icy secretary, who shields the Consul from the poor people who wait at the Consulate day in, day out. Delay, denial and demands for further documentation were clearly her delights, the petitioners no more than annoyances that she reduced to numbers and case files. DeVaere’s most cheerful moment came in a duet with Jean Broekhuizen, as one of the rare lucky ones whose request is approved, as they reviewed paper after paper that had to be signed and dated.

Paula Roediger, as John’s mother, took center stage in Act Two, when she clowned for her sickly grandchild; sang a lullaby, exotic and sad, to the baby and then to the weary Magda; and proffered a lament, less for the child, now dead, than for the son she would never see again.

Christopher Clayton, as John, the hunted freedom fighter, and Charles Fornara, as his foe, the intimidating agent of the secret police, faced off in the penultimate scene, as the agent persuaded his prey, with guns and threats, to leave the nominally neutral Consulate with him. The Consul was seen only once, in silhouette. When the secretary told Magda that the official could see her after his meeting with a “very important man,” it proved to be the agent who emerged from his office, and Magda, stunned, fainted.

Christopher Clayton. Photo © 2005 by Marisol Díaz.

Scott Williamson was a flamboyant Nika Magadoff, the magician, who tried to charm the secretary into granting priority to his request for a visa and, to demonstrate his skills, hypnotized those who waited into believing they were waltzing at a ball instead of keeping vigil in a grim office. This was one of several surreal sequences, imaginatively realized by Benjamin Spierman. Others were Magda’s dream, in which John and the secretary writhed together on the floor and the agent presented Magda’s baby, as a skeleton, to her, and the heroine’s final vision, in which her husband, his mother, and the magician and others with whom she had waited appeared.

Adam Alexander, Sarah Long, Silvie Jensen, Cameron Aiken and Helene Williams had other key assignments. A striking ensemble, which concluded Act One, and in which the people bringing concerns to the Consulate expressed their yearning, merits mention. Meganne George and Kimberly Glennon designed the deliberately drab, evocative sets and costumes.

Bronx Opera’s spring offering will be Giacomo Puccini’s “La Bohème,” in English, on May 13 and 14 at Lehman and 20 and 21 (matinee) at Hofstra University’s Adams Playhouse, in Hempstead.

Tickets $15, 25, 30 718/402-5202, http://www.bronxopera.org