By Heidi Waleson [WSJ, 22 June 2010]

The beauty of Roald Dahl's darkly comic children's books is how they balance attraction and menace. "The Golden Ticket"—an opera by composer Peter Ash and librettist Donald Sturrock, based on Dahl's novel "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," having its world premiere at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis—is most successful when its score does the same. The opera's best music is edgy and snappy, its astringent orchestration giving prominence to the winds and the brass, capturing the story's restless unpredictability. But when it ventures into pure lyricism, it often meanders and sags.