If you like opera you should absolutely experience Pacific Operaworks’s lovely puppets-and-animation staging of Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses. I don’t feel entirely comfortable recommending any early opera to the casual consumer of high notes; Monteverdi in Italian means “nothing as pretty as Puccini.”

Still, the production, a remount of South African artist William Kentridge’s 1998 collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company, knows how to tell its story (and in less than two hours) in as fresh and moving a fashion as anything from the 17th century could ever hope for.

Kentridge’s conceit offers a dying Ulysses one last reminiscence from his hospital bed in a modern day Johannesburg (all of the characters are large puppets paired with a handler and a voice). There’s marvelous attention to detail: the singing (such supreme voices!) is full of tiny sighs and nuanced sadness; Kentridge’s animation (fast-paced, charcoal-colored images of lonely roads, blooming flowers, and beating hearts that appear then erase themselves from view) supplements video footage of heart surgery and highways; the chamber orchestra captures the pulse of the music and pushes the tale forward; and the Handspring company are so committed that, for instance, you can watch Ulysses’s chest rise and fall under his covers without fail for the entire show (meanwhile, his faithful wife Penelope moves with such regal, expressive grace she appears to have more range than many Hollywood actresses).

The Moore Theatre is not, however, an ideal venue. In the first place, it’s freezing—bundle up for Antarctica (I’m not kidding). In the second, there doesn’t appear to be an ideal seat from which to take in everything you need to see (the supertitles, the animation, and the puppets, not to mention an occasional glance at the singers).

Yet I dealt with the resulting chill and neck cramp quite contentedly. The show is not as all-out dazzling as the Lepage one-acts that recently wowed Seattle Opera audiences. But it is truly inspired and just as much a sign that, no matter how dire the financial forecast, this city remains a place to be if you care about the state of the art.