The festival returns to a full performance schedule after two years with works including ‘Omar’ by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels and Yuval Sharon’s production of ‘La Bohème’
Jamez McCorkle as Omar PHOTO: LEIGH WEBBER
By Heidi Waleson
May 31, 2022 5:42 pm
Charleston, S.C.
Spoleto Festival USA has returned to a full performance schedule this spring—after the cancellation of its 2020 season and a reduced version in 2021—with a new general director in place. Mena Mark Hanna, age 37, the son of Egyptian immigrants and a scholar of cultural imperialism in the arts, came to Charleston from Berlin’s Barenboim-Said Akademie, where he was the founding dean and a professor of musicology and composition. Revised perspective was a theme of the 2022 Festival’s operas, notwithstanding the fact that the marquee event, the twice-postponed world premiere of “Omar” by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, was conceived and developed by Mr. Hanna’s predecessor Nigel Redden, who retired after 35 years.
“Omar” is about Omar ibn Said, a Muslim scholar who was captured from Futa Toro (in present-day Senegal), transported to America, and sold into slavery in Charleston in 1807. His autobiography, written in Arabic in 1831, survives. Ms. Giddens, a virtuoso vocalist, fiddle and banjo player, and songwriter, is devoted to reviving American black roots music. She wrote the libretto; to expand her musical vision into an operatic structure, she enlisted Mr. Abels, best known for his scores for films by Jordan Peele.
The autobiography is short on detail, so Ms. Giddens imagined Omar’s inner and outer lives. Act 1 has action: his capture and transportation; the slave market; Johnson, his cruel first owner; and his escape. Act 2 is more about atmosphere and philosophy: Omar’s Arabic writing on the walls of his jail cell in Fayetteville, N.C., leads Owen, a local plantation owner and devout Christian, to buy him with the intention of converting him. Omar, who died in 1864, still enslaved, did indeed convert; the opera fudges that point, and trails off into musings on commonalities between the two faiths.
Laquita Mitchell as Julie PHOTO: LEIGH WEBBER
Ms. Giddens also invented some supportive female characters—Omar’s mother, killed in the raid where he is captured, remains a steadying, pious voice in his head; Julie, an enslaved woman, guides him to Fayetteville; Owen’s young daughter tells her father about Omar’s writing (“like a little flock of birds in the sky”) and his praying. Still, the opera is more a collection of tableaus than dramatic scenes. Some of those, particularly the chorus numbers, are powerful: the voices of captured Africans who died at sea; a weary work song on the Johnson plantation; a jolly dance on the Owen plantation.
However, the tonal, lushly orchestrated score is pleasant but bland. There’s African drumming and some fiddling, but no banjo, and the fresh twang of Ms. Giddens’s compositional voice seems drowned in treacle. Even the arias, impassioned and often well-shaped, feel like ballads blown out of proportion, and the occasional jarring end rhymes (betrayed us/raid us) would make more sense in a music-theater setting, with spoken dialogue and songs, rather than an operatic context. In the libretto, Omar is urged to “tell his story,” but this softened depiction of a hideous time, and particularly the lack of clarity about how he might have struggled with conversion, pushes the piece into uplift territory, which seems odd for the subject.
After Jamez McCorkle, the affecting Omar, injured his leg in rehearsal, director Kaneza Schaal restaged the show around him in a wheelchair in Act 1, contributing to the feeling of stasis in scenes that should have crackled with tension. (In Act 2, when Omar is no longer fleeing, Mr. McCorkle stood and walked gingerly.) Cheryse McLeod Lewis and Laquita Mitchell brought soaring passion to Omar’s Mother and Julie; Malcolm MacKenzie differentiated Omar’s two owners nicely; Adam Klein was strong as the folksy Auctioneer. Conductor John Kennedy ably led his large forces; the chorus was particularly fine. Production designer Christopher Myers and set designer Amy Rubin implied locations using simple materials— mostly draped fabric and projections that included Arabic writing, period images like slave auction posters, and a video of black people square-dancing. The costumes by April Hickman and Micheline Russell-Brown cleverly evoke period dress in Africa and America; they are decorated with Omar’s Arabic script.
Matthew White as Rodolfo and Lauren Michelle as MimiPHOTO: LEIGH WEBBER
Yuval Sharon’s production of Puccini’s “La Bohème” offers an unusually fresh take on a chestnut: The acts are played in reverse order. It’s not just a gimmick—it works. With John Conklin’s simple set—a tilted, rotating disc; a few bits of furniture—no intermission, and a cut in Act 1, the story becomes one of swift, fleeting youth, the bareness of the characters’ physical lives contrasted with the richness of their dreams. We also leave the performance with the memory of Act 1’s explosion of hope and promise, rather than the story’s sad conclusion, and the rich-voiced Lauren Michelle (Mimi) and the poignant Matthew White (Rodolfo), nicely warmed up at the end of the evening, did their most fervent singing as brand-new lovers.
The interpolated Wanderer (George Shirley) succinctly narrated the scene changes; his time references (“two months earlier”) underlined the brevity of this love affair. Mr. Sharon’s acute direction accentuated the relationship game-playing of Musetta (Brandie Sutton) and Marcello (Troy Cook); Schaunard (the standout Benjamin Taylor) and Colline (Calvin Griffin) were also a couple here, markedly calmer than the other two. Kensho Watanabe conducted the sometimes overly exuberant orchestra. Jessica Jahn’s modest period costumes and John Torres’s atmospheric lighting were right on point.
Karim Sulayman and John Taylor Ward in ‘Unholy Wars’PHOTO: LEIGH WEBBER
“Unholy Wars,” conceived by the Lebanese-American tenor Karim Sulayman, seeks to reframe the “otherness” depiction of Middle Eastern people by European Baroque composers. The centerpiece of the 70-minute show is Monteverdi’s “Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda,” in which the crusader Tancredi kills the Muslim warrior Clorinda, whom he loves, because he does not recognize her in their nighttime battle. (In her final moments, Clorinda asks for Christian baptism.) Other pieces by Monteverdi and his contemporaries surround “Combattimento,” tracing a story of a man falling in love with a beautiful “Woman of the East” and then mourning her death.
Mr. Sulayman, soprano Raha Mirzadegan and bass-baritone John Taylor Ward sang the music with stylish elegance and intensity, accompanied by an excellent period-instrument octet led by violinist Julie Andrijeski. The reframing, subtle but palpable, came through in the staging, directed by Kevin Newbury and with water and sand to stand for desert and sea; the brief interludes of haunting electronic music by Mary Kouyoumdjian that separated the Baroque pieces, leaving space for contemplation; the choreography by Ebony Williams, performed by the eloquent dancer Coral Dolphin and the singers (who were impressive in the battle choreography); and the mesmerizing black-and-white animated drawings of Kevork Mourad, in which Jerusalem kept being built, destroyed, and then built again. The program’s love story felt like a metaphor for the fate of the city and its people. Mr. Sulayman delivered the show’s final aria, “Lascia ch’io pianga” from Handel’s “Rinaldo” (a century later than “Combattimento” but based on the same literary source), as an exquisitely naked lament for the loss of freedom. Then, during Ms. Kouyoumdjian’s postlude, the city rose again.
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).
AndyManshel.nyc 