‘Stonewall’ Review: Celebrating a Gay-Rights Milestone Onstage

Iain Bell’s new work at the New York City Opera only occasionally succeeds at evoking the spirit of rebellion.

Jordan Weatherston Pitts (center) with the company of New York City Opera’s ‘Stonewall.’ Photo: Sarah Shatz By Heidi Waleson July 2, 2019 1:27 pm ET

New York

Iain Bell’s opera “Stonewall,” presented by the New York City Opera, concluded its world premiere run on Friday, June 28, the 50th anniversary of the start of the uprising, sparked by a police raid, that marked the beginning of the modern gay-rights movement. In the Rose Theater lobby, operagoers took selfies with a pair of towering Empresses—in spike heels and “daytime” tiaras—from the Imperial Court of New York. Inside the theater, the ceiling lights glowed in Pride colors; Bob the Drag Queen, the winner of season 8 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” who had just performed at the Stonewall commemoration festivities downtown, warmed up the audience with some saucy comedy.

That ebullience only fitfully infused “Stonewall” the opera, a 75-minute pageant. Ten characters—too many—are dutifully introduced in the first 30-minute section: They included the butch lesbian; the Latino schoolteacher; the teen kicked out by his family; the African-American drag queen; the hustler who blackmails closeted men. Mark Campbell’s librettos allows each a quick personal history—think “A Chorus Line”—which reveal their experiences of being despised and marginalized. Mr. Bell’s mostly bland music supplies the occasional individuating touch, sometimes for better, as with tenor Jordan Weatherston Pitts, in full diva mode as the drag queen; and sometimes for worse, like Jessica Fishenfeld’s shrieking coloratura as she lists the conversion therapies forced on her character by her homophobic parents. Since representation was the order of the day, it was surprising that a trans man—Liz Bouk, who sings in an alto range—was cast as a trans woman. The characters are gradually woven into a recurring ensemble as they anticipate “Tonight” at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, but the “West Side Story” reference implicit in the text and the music feels appropriated rather than original.

The opera’s liveliest section is the five minutes of pure gay abandon at Stonewall. Two catchy, period-style pop songs, written by Messrs. Bell and Campbell and recorded by vocalist Darlene Love, play from the jukebox as the patrons dance and lip-synch. However, once the police raid starts, chaos descends, punctuated by the percussive thwack of nightsticks. It is impossible to follow the action or the music until Maggie (the butch lesbian, sung by the forceful mezzo Lisa Chavez) stands up to the cops. Once she is dragged off, the musical energy starts to snowball. Ironically, in the riot’s most dramatic moments, yelling replaces singing, even drowning out the large orchestra (led by Carolyn Kuan). A brief morning-after coda, in which the characters contemplate the future in a hopeful chorale, also had a Leonard Bernstein flavor—“On the Town” and “Candide”—yet captured neither the innocence nor the dark satire of those models.

Tenor Andrew Bidlack (Andy, the homeless teen) and bass-baritone Joseph Beutel (Troy, the hustler) were among the cast’s stronger singers. Director Leonard Foglia, choreographer Richard Stafford and fight director Rick Sordelet skillfully deployed a 40-member ensemble of singers and supers in addition to the principals to create swirling stage pictures of dancing and rioting (sometimes together—the riot included a kick line), but the stagings of the introductory scene and the coda were as static as the corresponding music. Riccardo Hernandez designed the simple set of movable black walls with neon accents, illuminated (or not) by lighting designer Ken Billington; David C. Woolard’s costumes—the hustler’s satin hot pants; the trans woman’s white hippie-style maxidress; the drag queen’s pink frock and elbow-length gloves—helped conjure the period. “Stonewall” evoked some of the spirit of the rebellion, but with too much textual telling and not enough musical showing, it didn’t believably construct the tinder box of repressed anger that would explode in 1969, paving the way for life in 2019, in which gay people can marry, Pride is celebrated with parades, and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” is a mainstream phenomenon.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).