Director Yuval Sharon has repurposed Wagner’s ‘Götterdämmerung’ in an inventive, Covid-appropriate Michigan Theatre Opera production staged in a parking garage for an audience confined to their cars.
By Heidi Waleson
Oct. 19, 2020 4:50 pm ET
Leave it to director Yuval Sharon to come up with a thought-provoking, original way to do live opera for a live audience at a time when singing and gathering in large groups would normally be a recipe for Covid contagion. Back in 2015, Mr. Sharon, founder of The Industry, created “Hopscotch,” which was performed in 24 cars driving around Los Angeles; the last live opera I saw pre-pandemic was his outdoor “Sweet Land,” a fierce commentary on colonialism and erasure. Now artistic director of Michigan Opera Theatre, he has repurposed Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” as a fable for our times.
Slimmed down to 65 minutes, sung in an English translation by Mr. Sharon, and performed in MOT’s parking garage for audience members in cars, “Twilight: Gods” manages to successfully evoke its host city, accentuate the opera’s message about cleansing a corrupt world, and offer a “Götterdämmerung” highlight reel featuring spectacular singers. Having soprano Christine Goerke (Brünnhilde) or bass Morris Robinson (Hagen) singing right outside your car window is an unusual privilege, to say the least.
The experience begins in the outdoor flat parking lot beside the Detroit Opera House, where a brief filmed prologue establishes the scene with poetry composed and spoken by Marsha Music, a Detroit writer and storyteller, who plays Erda, the opera’s fount of wisdom. Eight cars at a time are then guided into and through the multilevel parking structure next door. They stop for the staged scenes, most with live singers and instrumentalists. Car windows remain closed throughout; all sound is relayed via car radio, with each scene tuned to a different frequency.
Ms. Music’s text forms the connective tissue. Lively and colloquial, with diction that speaks to the moment (“gaslit gibberish,” “a grim, apocalyptic time,” and even “Come on baby, light that fire”), it distills Wagner’s complicated plot of greed, lust for power, betrayal and, finally, knowledge. Eliminating the human Gibichungs, it zeroes in on the gods, the Nibelungs, and their respective offspring. It’s still a lot to digest; “Ring” novices might find themselves confused.
The musical performances supply their own spin. On the first garage level, Catherine Martin, as Waltraute, recounts the problems in Valhalla accompanied by a sinewy solo cello, her despair naked without the usual big cushiony orchestra. The instrumentations of Edward Windels’s ingenious arrangements are apt. Bass clarinet, accordion and electric bass guitar make doubly sinister the murderous admonition of Alberich (Donnie Ray Albert) to his sleeping son Hagen (Mr. Robinson). Harp, marimba and vibraphone give the Rhinemaidens’ warning to Siegfried a suitably watery texture. (Vocal ensembles are tricky in this unconventional setup, and the handsome singing by Avery Boettcher, Olivia Johnson and Kaswanna Kanyinda felt a bit rhythmically stiff.) It was moving and novel to hear a lyric tenor, Sean Panikkar, give the hapless Siegfried’s death real pathos, since there was no need to bellow.
The breakout moment was Siegfried’s “Funeral March.” A hearse pulled into view, and the cars followed, lining up between rows of candles on the floor. The recorded Wagner music, arranged and performed by Lewis Pesacov, gradually took on a Motown beat and became a rollicking celebration, with the black-clad guides operating dancing colored lights. A more joyous vibe than what one experiences at that moment in the opera house, it set up the idea that death is not the end, but the beginning. Ms. Goerke’s ecstatic “Immolation Scene” on the open top deck, accompanied by the biggest band yet, carried that theme to its logical conclusion when she leaped into a Ford Mustang, the 10 millionth built, aka her horse, Grane, and drove off triumphantly. Audio of crackling fire represented the world-cleansing funeral pyre.
The production had numerous levels beyond the ones in the parking garage. Five of the eight singers, and Ms. Music, are people of color, appropriate for Detroit, a majority Black city; that the murdered Siegfried was one of them was surely not coincidence. The audience members, safely cocooned in cars, heard the pleas of singers and players outside in the symbolically virus-laden air, mediated through the occasionally staticky car radio. Alberich and Hagen’s dark corner seemed to harbor poisonous germs; on the roof, the scene of redemption, the fresh air seemed to blow them away. It wasn’t heavy-handed. The costumes, some of which came from Lyric Opera of Chicago’s “Ring,” did not shackle the show to any particular period, and the scenic, lighting and projection design by Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras also suggested rather than dictated. Things were kept simple but pithy: a bolt of blue cloth unrolled for the river; two burned-out cars on the roof.
Like “Hopscotch,” “Twilight: Gods” is a logistical feat. Twelve or 14 rotations of eight cars cycle through each of the four performances; scenes are played simultaneously. The company has also just added free digital screenings on Oct. 20 and 21 for a socially distanced audience inside the opera house. A co-production with Lyric Opera of Chicago, the show will be done there in April with a different text, written by the interdisciplinary artist Avery R. Young, reflecting not only a different city but, perhaps, a new time. Its ingenuity and mutability make “Twilight: Gods” an encouraging harbinger of opera’s future and our own.
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).
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