Opera Review: A Wild Musical Utopia

Philip Venables and Ted Huffman adapt Larry Mitchell’s classic of 1970s gay literature in a joyous, boundary-blurring event at Park Avenue Armory; also in New York, singer Kate Lindsey performed a program that tracked the career of Kurt Weill.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Dec. 5, 2025 at 5:06 pm ET

Themba Mvula (center) and ensemble in the event of music and movement at Park Avenue Armory. STEPHANIE BERGER

New York

Composer Philip Venables and writer-director Ted Huffman are a potent creative team, imagining their way into contemporary stories in unconventional but always arresting ways. “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” now in its North American premiere engagement at the Park Avenue Armory, is their wildest project yet. Based on Larry Mitchell’s 1977 self-published book of the same title—a queer-liberation fantasy that circulated for decades as a kind of samizdat in the gay world—their version of it is a kind of joyous communal theater, with its members recounting their history for one another through speech, song and dance. All of the 15 performers are highly skilled in their own artistic disciplines, but the boundaries are blurred—instrumentalists sing, singers play violins and percussion, and everyone commits vigorously to movement.

Mr. Huffman’s text captures the anarchic, utopian, very 1970s-counterculture spirit of the book, even as his additions and reorganizations streamline the narrative and reflect changes in the world since it was written. The “friends”—originally listed by Mitchell as straight women, lesbians, queens, fairies and queers—now include more categories of people “othered” by the paranoid and repressive capitalist patriarchy, aka “the men” in the country of Ramrod. Fierce, comic and sweet by turns, this depiction of struggle and survival in the battle of love against greed is both satirical and deeply serious.

Scenes are skillfully built out of fragments. Musical instruments, a rack of costumes, and chairs surround an empty stage. A singer intones a haunting melody—“It’s been a long time and still we are not free.” When actor Kit Green recounts an origin story of how the characters found one another, the music searches as well: The instruments, one at a time, offer brief riffs until the entire company is involved, energetically demonstrating “ecstatic communion.” Company members pull odd, often cobbled-together garments off the rack for different scenes (the costumes are by Theo Clinkard); during a tuning break, dancer Yandass writhes on the floor, trying to escape from an enveloping costume that seems almost alive. There are few props. The performers trundle the keyboard instruments out for use and then off again. Everything else is done with lighting (designed by Bertrand Couderc) and bodies.

Mr. Venables’s music, built on baroque and folk styles and instruments, enriches and illuminates the text. A comic song about “the men’s” obsession with papers is a pretty waltz aria accompanied by harp and flute; a saxophone picks up the tune and it turns into a raucous bossa nova, then into an Irish folk song with fiddle and accordion. Harpsichord and viola da gamba act as soloists as well as continuo; a modern lute song is a lullaby. Two sopranos and a countertenor depict a paradisiacal dream world of “fairies in the forest,” accompanied by an improvising violin. Nonverbal sung chorales often shimmer or glower beneath spoken text. The full company claps out one number—“The men never talk about how they feel . . . they pretend to be machines”; in another, everyone drums on plastic buckets. An earsplitting techno-accompanied dance party turns into a raid and a wild rebellion by the “queens”—likely a reference to the Stonewall uprising. While music director Yshani Perinpanayagam occasionally conducts and plays piano and organ, she is an equal part of the acting ensemble in their games, rituals, dances and embraces.

The final “revolution” ends in victory, yet the darkness of the ending—a new ritual, in which these once-marginalized people brutalize one another in order to remember their painful past—suggests, unsurprisingly, that the war is not over.

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Mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey and jazz pianist Baptiste Trotignon revisited the repertory of their 2017 recording “Thousands of Miles” on Dec. 2 at Weill Recital Hall. Built around the songs of Kurt Weill, their program tracks his musical life from the caustic Bertolt Brecht shows of 1920s Berlin through his Nazi-forced emigration to France and then to America. Ms. Lindsey finds a compelling interpretive middle ground between raspy, Lotte Lenya-esque cabaret stylings and the smoothed-out renditions typical of opera singers. Aided by Mr. Trotignon’s jazzy accompaniments and improvised segues between songs, she leans on extremes of expression—a whisper for the bitter practicalities of a teenage prostitute’s life in “Nannas Lied”; the refrain of “Denn wie man sich bettet, so liegt man” from “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” slowed to an incantation; a build to an outcry of anguish in the chanson “Je ne t’aime pas.” The whiplash between bitter and sweet is arresting, but Ms. Lindsey’s velvety mezzo is never less than beautiful, and her enunciation of German, English and French texts is impeccably crisp. 

The program ably demonstrates how Weill adapted his music to his environment. Yet even in his more conventionally melodic scores for Broadway, the acerbity of his early style peeks through, as in the turbulent “Trouble Man” from “Lost in the Stars” (1949), his heartbreaking musical based on “Cry, the Beloved Country.” There are also early songs by Alexander Zemlinsky, Alma Mahler and Erich Korngold, members of the Viennese musical elite circa 1900 and, like Weill, ultimately emigrés to America. As Ms. Lindsey gives full rein to their lush, chromatic melodies—especially Mahler’s surprising, orgasmic “Hymne”—she conjures up a world and age far from the astringency of Weill, and one they all left behind.