Opera News, August 2004, Mark Thomas Ketterson
“Bridget Kimak’s setting was straightforward and charming, the saloon rendered in a naïve, colourful fashion, with lopsided doors and oversized taxidermy, creating a mildly cartoon-like frame for Cowell’s madcap direction…the audience was clearly in bliss,”

Chicago Tribune, May 21, 2004, John von Rhein
“The (onstage, honky-tonk) piano player is just one sly daub of Wild West color that makes Chicago Opera Theater’s production of ‘Il Viaggio a Reims’ such exuberant fun… Director Christopher Cowell and designer Bridget Kimak have transferred Rossini’s cantata scenica from France to 1865 America.”

Chicago Sun Times, May 21, 2004
“Cowell and production designer Bridget Kimak came up with the inspired idea of setting the action in the American West just before Lincoln’s 1864 inauguration”…’Il Viaggio’s’ collection of stereotypes – the flighty French courtesan, the blundering Englishman, the passionate Russian, the intellectual Pole, the fiery Spaniard – fit most comfortably into the motley swarm buzzing around an American frontier saloon. Of course, there also was room for a pure-voice Temperance Nightingale, a travelling photographer with an eye for the ladies and a lady proprietress looking out for the cash box as well as the good name of her Golden Lily Saloon”