The company’s world-premiere production is a taut, skillful adaptation of the classic Norman Maclean novella about a stalwart Westerner and his gambling-addicted brother.
By
Heidi Waleson
Sept. 23, 2026 at 1:29 pm ET
A scene from the opera ‘A River Runs Through It.’ NILE SCOTT STUDIOS
Bozeman, Mont.
It’s appropriate that Opera Montana’s first commissioned work is Zach Redler’s “A River Runs Through It,” which opened last week at the Ellen Theatre here. Based on Norman Maclean’s elegiac 1976 novella about fly fishing and family in Missoula, 200 miles to the northwest, it embodies the book’s characters, themes and powerful sense of place with a sophistication and eloquence that take it beyond the regional into the universal.
Librettists Kelley Rourke and Matt Foss have skillfully adapted the story, extracting its essential events and distilling them into a taut 90 minutes. To make it theatrical, they have also given each of the seven characters weight, artfully rebalancing the narrator’s strong voice in the novella. An earlier adaptation, Robert Redford’s 1992 film, took different liberties with the source.
“River” is Norman’s recollection of his youth—dominated by his Presbyterian minister father, John, who believes that there is no clear line between religion and fly fishing, and his younger brother, Paul, a brilliant fisherman who can’t control the dangerous gambling habit that costs him his life. In the opera, set in 1937, the secondary figures, particularly the women, are vividly characterized as well: Norman’s wife, Jessie; his mother, Clara; Jessie’s feckless brother, Neal; and Heidi, the local wild woman who gets together with Neal. (In the novella, she is known only as “Rawhide,” the town slut who is always drunk; the opera offers a more nuanced portrait.)
Mr. Redler’s score leans toward musical theater, with tuneful, rhythmic arias often built on strophic, deftly rhymed text as well as deep affinity with Maclean’s poetic diction. The styles are varied: Mezzo Megan Marino struts through a jangly country ditty that shows off Heidi’s toughness and vulnerability, while David Pittsinger’s opulent bass-baritone takes a more operatic turn in John’s musing aria “To fish is to chase a spot of time.” We understand Paul’s fatal bravado in tenor Michael Kuhn’s jaunty recounting of a race with a rabbit that ends with him crashing his car—it’s a performance designed to deflect Norman’s offer of help.
The most striking musical moments are the ensembles. In the parallel opening and closing sections and the fishing scenes, the overlapping voices evoke the world of water, a place of grace and redemption. In scene 5, the center of the opera, an ill-fated excursion to the river, the separate, troubled musings of Norman, Paul, Neal and Heidi join in a hypnotic, time-stopping moment as each one experiences “something close to love.” In the final scene, after Paul’s death, all seven characters weave the opera’s musical themes together with Maclean’s lyrical words: “Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”
The strong cast also included Schyler Vargas, as a stalwart Norman, and Christine Taylor Price, as a bright-voiced Jessie, figuring out their own relationship and trying to help their respective brothers. They and Mr. Kuhn have musical-theater backgrounds and occasionally strayed too far into its croons and swoops. Phyllis Pancella brought thoughtful intensity to Clara’s aria of worry about her sons. Tenor Ryan Bryce Johnson displayed comic flair as Neal, who covers his inadequacies with tall tales. Leading an orchestra of 22, featuring lively colorations from saxophone, harp, marimba and guitar, conductor Michael Sakir captured the music’s landscape of alternating pulse and elegy.
Kristin Ellert’s single set—chairs, hats and fishing rods stacked at the rear of the stage and brought forward as needed—got its flavor from beautifully crafted video that showed a front porch, the outside of a jail, and of course the river from many different angles, both realistic and abstract. Stephen Sakowski’s lighting matched the opera’s moods; Stacy Hostetter’s costumes evoked the place and the period. Mr. Foss was the capable director; Jason Borger the fly-fishing consultant. Norman, Paul and John had poles, but the swirling lines of their casts were shown only in the video, and the fish they caught were left to the imagination. The opera runs through Oct. 4 in Bozeman and Missoula.
