‘A Marvelous Order’ Review: Battling the Power Broker

The opera, which premiered at Penn State, depicts the fierce conflict between urban planner Robert Moses and journalist Jane Jacobs.

Rinde Eckert as Robert Moses (right), with Tomas Cruz

PHOTO: JEREMY DANIEL

By Heidi Waleson

Length (6 minutes)Queue

State College, Pa.

It’s odd that “A Marvelous Order,” an opera depicting the epic Robert Moses vs. Jane Jacobs battle over the fate of New York City and the future of urbanism, had its world premiere last Thursday not in New York, but at Penn State University during Homecoming Week. New York is getting a starry version of the tale—David Hare’s “Straight Line Crazy,” imported from London with Ralph Fiennes as Moses, opening this week at the Shed for a sold-out run—but the opera deserves a hometown hearing, and wider circulation, for its thoughtful depiction of the conflict and its unusually imaginative, multimedia form. 

Moses, the unelected king of New York public works, who spent four decades building bridges and highways to funnel cars into, out of and through New York City, met his match in Jane Jacobs, a journalist and the author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961). The opera zeroes in on two battles: Moses’s 1953 effort to build a four-lane highway—a continuation of Fifth Avenue—through Washington Square Park and, several years later, his Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have allowed cars to proceed unimpeded from New Jersey to Long Island. Moses lost both those battles when Jacobs rallied neighborhood and political support on behalf of the people who lived in the paths of those proposed juggernauts. 

The opera, a collaboration of composer Judd Greenstein, librettist Tracy K. Smith and director/animation creator Joshua Frankel, unfolds in 11 sharp vignettes that explore the conflict on multiple levels. Mr. Greenstein’s minimalist music can evoke the elegant chaos of daily life in Jacobs’s Greenwich Village in the opening section, “The Ballet of the Streets,” with the voices of the ensemble members flowing over and around each other, as well as the lockstep meters of a meeting in Moses’s office. Ms. Smith’s libretto is spare, letting repeated single words (“Obstacle!”) tell the story, rather than insisting on a detailed narrative, and her poetic turns of phrase fit beautifully. Mr. Frankel’s stunning animations, moving in rhythm with the music, are an equal storytelling element. Some are abstract—the polygon patterns that mirror the crazy-quilt blocks of the Village; others—like the line drawings of walking figures or the blood-red ribbon that steamrolls over Washington Square Park—are explicit. 

Megan Schubert as Jane Jacobs, with Blythe Gaissert and Kamala Sankaram

PHOTO: JEREMY DANIEL

Amplification made the libretto intelligible—some text sections were projected as part of the animation design, but there were no supertitles, and for the most part, none were needed. (Greg Allen did the sound design.) Megan Schubert’s vivid high soprano colored Jacobs’s obsessiveness and obstinate determination; tenor Rinde Eckert’s distinctive stage persona and the jittery, anxious quality of his music made for a fascinating Moses, who shouts everyone down. The piece humanized them both: When Moses has a meltdown over being beaten by “a bunch of mothers,” his aria suggests a man who got conflicting messages about life and manhood from his own mother. And in the final scene, when the two have an imaginary, perhaps posthumous, encounter, Jacobs sings wearily, “I thought I had a voice. . . . Was it nothing more than a faint stirring? A dog barking and barking and barking, making nothing but a far-off wordless wind?”

The many varied ensembles—a polyphonic streetscape, a protest chant— made for a consistently energetic atmosphere, and the seven supporting singers, all playing multiple roles, were excellent. Kamala Sankaram had a hilarious moment as a Villager personally offended by the Washington Square plan, repeating the words “just sick!”; Christopher Herbert was a splendidly self-important Moses mouthpiece at a public hearing; Tomás Cruz’s falsetto gave a poignant edge to a Villager’s testimony about the importance of Washington Square Park in his life. Blythe Gaissert brought a rich mezzo to the Displaced Woman, though the purpose of her character was unclear; Melisa Bonetti, Kelvin Chan and Tesia Kwarteng made strong contributions. In the pit, the NOW Ensemble (piano, guitar, clarinet, double bass, flute), conducted by David Bloom, supplied distinctive individual timbres combined with rhythmic precision and dynamic forward motion. 

The animations were the main visual event. They were projected on a rear screen and on the simple movable cubes and columns that made up most of David Ogle’s set design, coordinating well with Robert Bloom’s lighting. Patrick McCollum’s movement direction and choreography synchronized the human characters with the images.

The opera strives for a nuanced view. It avoids any sense of triumphalism over Jacobs’s victories. “Jones Beach (1927),” which opens Act II, is about how some of Moses’s efforts to create amenities—access to the sea, public parks, swimming pools—for New Yorkers were applauded and appreciated at the time. It was only later that the basic incompatibility of urban life with lots of cars, along with the racist connotations of “urban renewal,” became clear. For a contemporary context, the celebrations of the opening of the newly renovated Geffen Hall included a paean to San Juan Hill, the racially diverse neighborhood that Moses tore down to build Lincoln Center. 

The larger problem has not been solved. The struggle between a top-down planning strategy and one that embraces how people actually live, along with the question of who gets to make the decisions about how change happens, remains a pertinent concern today, and not just in New York City. Still, one couldn’t help feeling relieved when the huge red shapes, representing dehumanizing housing-project buildings, that hovered over Manhattan in Mr. Frankel’s animation, ready to replace blocks of vibrant existing neighborhoods, suddenly dissolved into bits and floated away, like butterflies.

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).