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The Met’s new production of the Donizetti work, by Simon Stone and dubbed ‘Lucia: Closeups of a Cursed Life,’ transports the tragic tale to a dying American Rust Belt community in the present day.

By Heidi Waleson

April 25, 2022 5:10 pm ET

Simon Stone’s remarkable new production of Donizetti’s “ Lucia di Lammermoor, ” which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday, updates the opera to a dying American Rust Belt community in the present day and dubs it “Lucia: Closeups of a Cursed Life.” The show is a feat of technical wizardry, encompassing a turntable that revolves almost constantly—during the action and while set pieces are moved on and off it—as well as a lot of live and pre-recorded video. Yet the most startling effect is how profoundly this thoughtful interpretation erases the opera’s Romantic aura and accentuates its universal despair, upending the traditional balance of tragedy elevated through beautiful sounds. Here, the singers, especially the two splendid leads, really seem to be singing for their lives.

Based on a novel by Sir Walter Scott, set centuries ago in a world of warring Scottish aristocrats, the story translates neatly to the present. Enrico (Artur Ruciński) plans to marry his sister Lucia ( Nadine Sierra ) to Arturo ( Eric Ferring ) to revive the failing family fortunes. Their shared commercial interests aren’t specified—here Enrico seems to run a shady car business—but criminality is implied. Lizzie Clachan’s astonishing set, in which facades and cross-sections of buildings— including a pawn shop, a 24-hour pharmacy, a motel with a neon cross on its roof, and more—are jammed into claustrophobic proximity and viewed from constantly changing angles, evokes the seediness and desperation of the town. Video, some of it filmed in real time by onstage camera operators who follow the characters around, offers still more angles and closeups. We can watch Lucia climbing out her bedroom window to join her lover Edgardo (Javier Camarena) in the mini mart where he is a cashier while Enrico plots in his downstairs office. And that’s just the first scene. 

The direction explicitly heightens the opera’s central themes of escape and violence. Lucia visits the pharmacy and swallows some opioids; she is high when she sees the ghost at the fountain (a water treatment plant). The ghost, seen on video, is a young woman bleeding to death after being stabbed by her lover. Lucia and Edgardo meet behind the screen of a drive-in movie that is showing a 1947 Bob Hope comedy (an unlikely choice, but certainly escapist); Edgardo leaves his dead-end job to join the army. Enrico, threatening Lucia, seizes her by the hair and shoves her, a warning of worse to come. As Edgardo and Enrico face off at the end of Act 2, after Edgardo interrupts the forced wedding ceremony, a group of women in the background launch into a kicking, hair-pulling fight of their own. 

Ms. Sierra’s Lucia, in tight pants, crop top and a pale pink bomber jacket, is no fragile flower. With her crystalline soprano, bright, fluid coloratura and fearless ornamentation, she comes vividly alive and tries to resist her fate. Her mad scene feels more like a suicidal performance. Beautifully and confidently sung—especially the duet with the eerie glass harmonica—it is her construction of the wedding she wanted for the benefit of the guests. On the stage, she’s covered head to foot in Arturo’s blood (we’ve already seen his blood-soaked body in the motel room); in the video, she’s kissing Edgardo in the motel. There’s no collapse or vague death from the vapors—on the video, she grabs a gun and blood spatters on the wall behind her. There may be no way out for Lucia, but she took one male tormentor with her. There is some loss of poignancy as a result, however. Can we only feel for female operatic victims if they go without a fight?

Interestingly, the production gives space to the struggles of the opera’s men as well. Mr. Camarena, a thrilling bel canto tenor, makes Edgardo sympathetic as well as amorous and hot-headed. Even the bully Enrico, stalwartly sung by Mr. Ruciński, seems caught in the toils of economic decline. The scene at the beginning of Act 3, when Enrico, waving a whiskey bottle, leaves the wedding to challenge Edgardo to a fight, suggests that their mutual male aggression stems from a hopeless lack of options. For sheer unexpectedness, this had some of the poignancy that the subsequent mad scene lacked. Bass Matthew Rose avoided the unctuous manner that can affect Raimondo, the priest/confidant who betrays Lucia; his singing and demeanor were chillingly accepting of his own powerlessness, even as he sat beside Arturo’s bloody corpse. 

Conductor Riccardo Frizza’s stylish and buoyant reading of the score worked securely in tandem with Mr. Stone’s direction, reflecting its continual motion, yet knowing when to stop and expand into a moment, such as the long breaths of the Act 2 sextet. The chorus work improved after some coordination issues in the first scene. Costumes like Enrico’s drab plaid shirt and Arturo’s sharp pink suit, by Alice Babidge and Blanca Añón, helped cement the milieu. James Farncombe’s lighting made the set’s innumerable details pop, and evoked mood and time with clinical precision. As the buildings broke apart, turned, and were shoved together in different configurations, the audience could experience the disorientation that unmoors and destroys the opera’s characters along with them. 

—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).

In Los Angeles, Du Yun’s solo opera about a father’s struggles has its premiere and the Los Angeles Philharmonic teams with Deaf West Theatre for a unique take on Beethoven’s work. 

By 

Heidi Waleson

Updated April 18, 2022 6:29 pm ET

Los Angeles

In an early scene of Du Yun’s “In Our Daughter’s Eyes”—a solo opera commissioned, developed and produced by Beth Morrison Projects that had its premiere last week at Redcat as part of LA Opera’s Off Grand series—baritone Nathan Gunn, as an expectant father writing a journal, sings, “I have decided to become the protector of your story.” As the harrowing 70-minute piece unfurls, the nameless protagonist’s understanding of his power to protect or influence anything will undergo serious re-evaluation. His emotional shifts, exposed and parsed at a granular level through Michael Joseph McQuilken’s economical libretto and Du Yun’s multihued score, are the opera’s subject; the pregnancy’s agonizing trajectory is the agent of those changes. 

Optimism reigns through the first half of the piece. We hear about ultrasounds and the heartbeat; in a comic, jazzy section titled “Cravings,” the protagonist scours seven stores for items—including flax, coconuts and Moon Pies. Even the darker parts—the admissions of his need for attention and his alcohol dependency; a scary dream about diving into a frozen lake to rescue the child—end in resolutions to do better. The lake dream, for example, concludes with the line “I’ll hold my breath forever if that’s what it takes to save you.” But that classic, grandiose parental vow turns out to be useless. Midway through the opera and the pregnancy, we discover that the fetus, a girl, has a rare condition that is “incompatible with life.” The parents opt to carry to term in order to donate her organs and help other sick babies, but even that power, it seems, may be denied them. 

Mr. Gunn explores vocal expression far beyond typical baritone lyricism with whispers, speech and crooning into a microphone. There’s even a raspy, throaty howl of pain during “The Bar,” which is scored like a cacophonous death-metal song, as he has a dream about getting “blackout drunk” on learning the diagnosis. Every vocal turn seems authentic to the singer; even the lyric parts are never merely pretty but infused with raw feeling. Mr. Gunn disappears into this flawed person who ultimately finds strength he didn’t think he had. 

The six-member orchestra (violin, cello, clarinet/saxophone, trumpet, electric guitar and percussion), skillfully conducted by Kamna Gupta, conjures up an astonishing variety of timbres as the instruments solo, are mixed and set against each other or joined into a visceral wave. Each section—with a xylophone that sounds like a child’s toy; a muted trumpet suggesting hope in the midst of tragedy; a hint of a siren underlying squealing strings—reflects a new and different dive into the complexities of the protagonist’s emotions. 

The production, directed by Mr. McQuilken, with set and lighting by Maruti Evans and costumes by E.B. Brooks, is a physical metaphor for the protagonist’s struggle for control. The set is his workshop, where he assembles a crib, pries up a floorboard to find his hidden whiskey, and, in “The Bar” dream sequence, flips open a table to reveal a wall of bottles, hellishly illuminated in red. Filmed material adds texture, beginning with the opening sequence, a nonvocal, sparely orchestrated dream of a child who floats out of bed and through a house, past a father building model airplanes and a mother drinking tea, and out into the cosmos. In “Cravings,” the supermarket freezer cases scroll by; in “Legacy,” a father takes his daughter to buy a piano. As the piece proceeds, Mr. Gunn rips down the video screens and crams them into a trash can. By the end, it’s just him, taking stock of what he’s learned.

***

The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s collaboration with Deaf West Theatre on Beethoven’s “Fidelio” last week at Walt Disney Concert Hall was intriguing in theory. In the semistaged performance, each singing character had a deaf actor counterpart, thereby creating a double show for hearing and nonhearing audience members. Solange Mendoza’s costumes, which resembled medieval robes, differentiated through color and fabric, with the singers in bulky layers of white and the actors in more fluid grays and browns; James F. Ingalls’s lighting helped focus attention appropriately. At times, director Alberto Arvelo had the singers stand still and serve as the voices for the ASL-signing actors; at others, the two performers playing the same character interacted with each other; and sometimes, everyone was in action together. Spoken dialogue passages were ASL-only, making for unusual onstage silences. Colin Analco was the ASL choreographer.

At first, it was fascinating to watch, especially given actors like Russell Harvard (Rocco), who conveyed an acute physical sense of the music’s pulse and duration and its aural power. But after a while, the broadness of the ASL gestures, necessary for them to read in the large theater, became distracting for this hearing audience member, especially in scenes with multiple characters. Ironically, operatic acting was once all semaphoric, a style that fell into disfavor with the modern emphasis on realism, and the gestures of the deaf actors at times seemed like a throwback. (Listeners unaccustomed to the over-the-top sound of the operatic voice might well think it similarly exaggerated.) 

The musical rendition had its own problems. As Leonore, who disguises herself as a man to rescue her imprisoned husband, soprano Christiane Libor was underwhelming, her pitch wavery and her line insecure. As her husband, Florestan, tenor Ian Koziara started out strong with his opening exclamation of “Gott! Welch Dunkel hier!” but his power faded quickly, a liability in this vocally challenging role. The star of the show was Ryan Speedo Green, whose sumptuous bass-baritone gave the jailer Rocco buoyant heft and personality. Bass-baritone Shenyang was also vocally imposing as the wicked Don Pizarro, though his actor counterpart, Gabriel Silva, upstaged him, playing the classic dastardly villain in black. Gabriella Reyes was a sweetly innocent Marzelline, Rocco’s daughter. Conductor Gustavo Dudamel pushed the tempi mercilessly, giving much of the performance a rough-and-ready feel. The stage setup, with the orchestra in front and the singers and actors on a raised semicircular platform behind it, meant better aural presence for the orchestra than for the singers.

The singing/signing duality worked well for the chorus parts. The Los Angeles Master Chorale sang eloquently from tiered seats flanking the stage while the Coro de Manos Blancas from Venezuela signed from the platform. The Coro’s rendition of the prisoner’s chorus, “O welche Lust,” with its synchronized gestures, communicated the same magical feeling of awe at release from bondage, however temporary, as the singing did. 

—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). 

Michel van der Aa’s film opera imagines what it would be like to leave your body behind to have your mind preserved in the digital world. 

By Heidi Waleson

March 24, 2022 5:52 pm ET

New York

Michel van der Aa’s work explores the intersection of music, film and technology. “Upload,” his haunting new film opera, which had its North American premiere at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday, skillfully harnesses all those elements to ask existential questions: What does it really mean to be alive, even as technology increasingly mediates and expands the space between life and death? Is it possible to be alive—and human—without a body? Even more important, is it possible to be human without pain?

The 85-minute piece starts in cavernous darkness. A disembodied soprano voice sings pairs of words that are all about physicality—“expand-lungs,” “pull-muscle,” “carry-weight.” A baritone voice joins in, alternating with its own word pairs. The list ends with “weight-less,” which is the current state of one of the two main characters. The story—Mr. Van der Aa wrote the eloquent libretto, in addition to composing the music and directing the show—is revealed through flashbacks. The Father (baritone Roderick Williams ), profoundly depressed after the death of his wife, has submitted to a radical new procedure. His mind has been uploaded and stored on a proprietary blockchain; his physical body and brain were destroyed. Post-transfer, he is visible to his beloved Daughter (soprano Julia Bullock ) as an avatar with no corporeal presence. Uploads, we discover, are minds freed of the infirmities of biology; they speak, feel, evolve and are eternal. 

The flaws in this seemingly ideal solution soon become apparent: The Father realizes that the unbearable trauma of abandonment that he was trying to escape is still part of him. He must now persuade the Daughter to “terminate” him or he will suffer forever. She, who was not consulted in advance about his upload and is distraught about his new state, is faced with the terrible prospect of having to kill him herself. 

The stage has a large screen at the rear and three movable screens in front of it. The action alternates between past and present. In the present, the Daughter appears live and the Father is an onscreen image. (The actual Mr. Williams is at the side of stage; his performance is transmitted in real time via motion capture technology.) The past, shown in a film that uses seven speaking actors, traces the process of being uploaded at the clinic.

Scenes set in the present are sung and brim with messy human emotionality, particularly from Ms. Bullock, who gives an unrestrained, impassioned performance. The yearning lyricism of her arias and the force of her untrammeled anger contrast with Mr. Williams’s more measured, articulated vocalism; Father and Daughter are arguing from different spheres. The 11-member orchestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, conducted by Otto Tausk, is often punchy and percussion-forward, mirroring the chaotic upheaval of the characters’ reality and its dramatic arc. When the instrumental texture smooths and thins, the characters are recalling a nostalgic past or envisioning an unknown future. In one of the most moving effects, a funereal organ sound accompanies matching arias as the two contemplate the possibility of eternal separation from each other.

By contrast, the all-spoken scenes of the film of the upload clinic imply a scientific confidence in perfectibility. The laboratories there are furnished with mysterious technological objects. Even creepier is the clean, corporate, youthful amiability of both the CEO ( Ashley Zukerman ) and the psychiatrist ( Katja Herbers ), who, in order to model the Father’s brain, interviews his brother-in-law ( Samuel West, startlingly recognizable as the curmudgeonly vet from “All Creatures Great and Small”). When there is live orchestral accompaniment for the film, it has a noisy, mechanical vibe, suggesting some stress underneath the smooth façade.

Similarly, Mr. Van der Aa’s varied, textured use of film elsewhere in the opera goes far beyond illustration. In the scenes with the Daughter in the present, it serves as the set, depicting a large New York loft and a roof garden, but is never quite static. Mr. Williams’s avatar is sometimes a straightforward copy; at others, it is hugely enlarged and pulsating in streams of pixels. Midway through the opera Ms. Bullock sings a gorgeous, meditative aria that tries to picture the Father’s present existence. As she muses, “This is where you are now,” images unfurl around her. They could be undersea reefs, subatomic structures or mathematical fractals—beautiful but uncategorizable to her or to us. 

And in the penultimate scene, as the Daughter lies in bed, trying to decide what to do, a huge sheet is lowered over the audience, showing enormous video images of the heads of Father and Daughter on their respective pillows, as if we were at an IMAX movie. Again, they sing the word pairs as they did in the beginning, and the images seem as real as the humans. We aren’t told what the final decision is, but here, the two appear at peace with each other, just as music, film, and technology have coalesced. Are we being lulled into acceptance, as we were visually seduced by those beautiful fractals? Mr. Van der Aa isn’t telling. 

—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).

The U.S. premiere of a show, delayed by Covid-19, drawn from a Chinese compilation of myths that was first transcribed in the fourth century B.C.

By Heidi Waleson

March 17, 2022 6:11 pm ET

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Over the 80 minutes of “Book of Mountains & Seas,” which had its U.S. premiere on Tuesday at St. Ann’s Warehouse, composer Huang Ruo and director-designer Basil Twist create the world and destroy it. Their materials are simple: 12 singers and two percussionists along with some lengths of silk, large pieces of driftwood-like material and paper lanterns manipulated by six puppeteers. The piece is based on the eponymous Chinese compilation of myths that was first transcribed in the fourth century B.C.; the sung text is in Mandarin Chinese and an invented language. Yet the plots of the four myths that the composer adapted into the libretto are given only the most basic outline in the English supertitles, for the spirit of this haunting evening is atmospheric rather than narrative. “Book of Mountains & Seas” is an exquisite masterpiece of suggestion, an immersive tapestry of sound and image that weaves itself into your consciousness and makes its point about the interdependence of humans and their planet without ever saying it outright.

The opera begins in darkness. Only the faces of the singers, members of the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, are illuminated; you can barely make out the percussionists ( Michael Murphy and John Ostrowski ) positioned at stage right and left. The singers, three per voice type (soprano, alto, tenor, bass), all have independent lines, and the music layers the voices in various combinations to create different textures and sonic effects. In the first scene, depicting a creation story about Pan Gu —a being whose body parts ultimately become the Earth’s rocks, rivers and finally humans—solo lines come together to build a hypnotic, chant-like texture with tight harmonic intervals. Here, it is mostly a cappella, with just some soft gong strokes adding another color. The singers move apart to reveal, at center stage, driftwood pieces emerging from Pan Gu’s cosmic egg; the glowing lanterns that are his eyes become the sun and the moon.

In the three subsequent scenes, new combinations of all these elements expand the piece’s mythic universe. In “The Spirit Bird,” a billowing sheet of silk becomes the ocean; a smaller one, flapping above, is the bird, once a princess who drowned. In revenge, she flies back and forth above the ocean, dropping twigs and branches into it. The percussionists trade bass drumbeats, symbolizing the ocean’s vastness and tides, as the soprano and alto lines swoop above the men’s repeated phrases.

In the third myth, 10 suns take turns revolving around the Earth until the day they decide to all come out together. The setup is extended at a length that seems impossible to sustain, but it works: The suns, paper lanterns, glowing orange and carried on long poles, emerge one at a time as the high and low voices alternate, with more joining in at each entrance, accompanied by the shimmering drone of a temple bowl and a high-pitched finger cymbal. When all the suns are visible, the ritual mood suddenly evaporates and violence takes over. The drum and marimba pound while the suns dance, change color and even dangle menacingly over the audience—their combined heat makes the Earth burn and die. The archery god then shoots nine of them, turning them blue, and leaving one—along with a single bass voice, the cymbal and the temple bowl—to light the Earth..

For the final scene, the driftwood pieces are gloriously assembled into the giant Kua Fu, whom we see chasing the sun across the Earth, but never catching it. A percussionist pounds out his journey, weaving around the rhythmic, repeating voices, symbolizing the frustration of his quest. The giant falls in exhaustion and drinks the (silken) rivers dry. Finally, he dies—pieces of his body are taken away. Once again, we are in the dark, with only the illuminated faces of the singers visible. The titles tell us that the giant’s staff became a forest of peach blossoms; bits of bright paper drop from above; and the final notes, soft solo voices over a drone, suggest a faint hope for rebirth. The cycle, it implies, will begin anew; we are fated to keep creating and destroying the planet.

Poe Saegusa designed the lighting; Lynne Buckson devised the black velvet costumes that were perfectly invisible until the curtain call. Huang Ruo conducted from the booth behind the audience. This extraordinary piece, co-produced and co-commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects, had its world premiere last November at the Royal Danish Opera House with the choir Ars Nova Copenhagen. It was supposed to be part of January’s Prototype Festival, which was canceled due to the Covid-19 surge. Its resurrection two months later seems of a piece with the fragile hope of its ending: Perhaps there is something to be learned from death and devastation.

—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).

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Center and the 10th anniversary of the American Opera Initiative, monument-inspired premieres from diverse creators

By Heidi Waleson

March 8, 2022 6:51 pm ET

Washington

Operas written for special occasions have a long history—for example, the many French Baroque pieces created for coronations and weddings. “Written in Stone,” which had its premiere by the Washington National Opera on Saturday, commemorates both the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy Center, WNO’s home, and the 10th anniversary of the American Opera Initiative, the company’s fruitful new-works development program. The project deftly combines the two, casting the Kennedy Center as a “living monument” and a diverse group of living creators as the appropriate people to explore the idea that monuments are more than cold stone.

The brief curtain raiser, the solo piece “Chantal” by Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran, calls the very permanence of monuments into question. Ms. Moran, a potent mezzo, plays a surveyor who declares, “You know I know you’re leaning” and suggests that some monuments have outlived their time. “Rise” by Kamala Sankaram and A.M. Homes and “it all falls down” by Carlos Simon and Marc Bamuthi Joseph use the monument theme to make statements about changing times: the first regarding the role of women in civil society, the second about homosexuality. Finally, “The Rift” by Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang looks at the divisions in American society through the story of the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

“Rise” starts out playfully, its jaunty orchestration depicting Alicia (Vanessa Becerra), a Latina Girl Scout lost in the Capitol and desperate for a bathroom. She encounters a Powerful Woman ( Daryl Freedman, whose mezzo voice indeed powerful); the comic byplay about how long it took to get a convenient women’s rest room in this male bastion serves as a slightly awkward metaphor for the larger issue. The rest of the piece, featuring J’nai Bridges as a Black Capitol police officer, revolves around the Portrait Monument, Adelaide Johnson’s massive sculpture depicting Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, which was presented to Congress in 1921 in celebration of women winning the right to vote, and then ignominiously consigned to the Capitol crypt until 1997. We learn that part of the monument is rough and uncarved, emblematic of the struggle that continues. The opera is educational, if a bit didactic, and the final burst of inspiration—“Rise and add your name”—is appropriately fervent.

“it all falls down” is tighter and more character-based, built on the conflict between Mtchll, a pastor, and Bklyn, his son and successor, over the revelation that Bklyn is gay, and the efforts of their wife/mother, Laurel, to bring them together. The ostensible monument here is the Supreme Court, and its 2015 decision recognizing same-sex marriage, but the real monument at issue is the Black church, and whether it can accommodate such a challenge to its traditional values.

Church cadences of preaching and congregational response infuse the score; the chorus parts supply the sense of community and familial strength, even as the three central characters enact a struggle that could pull it apart at the seams. As Laurel, Ms. Bridges had more opportunity to shine than she did in “Rise,” her voluptuous soprano soaring in the peacemaker’s role. Bass-baritone Alfred Walker and tenor Christian Mark Gibbs brought vocal heft and theatrical intensity to father and son. In the final scene, the chorus sings text from the 2015 decision, as if approving of it, yet James Robinson’s directing astutely leaves open the question of whether Mtchll will agree to the premise of “Love over rules” and accept his son as he is.

“The Rift,” the longest and most substantial work in the evening, recalls the conflicts over the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which, from the time it was authorized in 1980, revived the pain of a deeply unpopular and divisive war. Four excellent singers play multiple characters, including Maya Lin ( Karen Vuong ), the Yale undergraduate who submitted the winning design (out of 1,421) to the blind competition, and Robert McNamara ( Rod Gilfry ), the defense secretary whose role in escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam made his name synonymous with its disastrous progress and outcome. The opera opens with a rhythmic, repeated, two-note motif, emblematic of the rift itself; then brief but potent scenes, each one musically distinctive, look at all the angles. In one, detractors squabble in a spoken melee (“No memorial for baby-killers!”); in the next, Maya Lin passionately describes her project, “It appears as a rift in the earth.” The aria, in which Mr. Hwang artfully mingles his own words and Ms. Lin’s, becomes an eloquent vision of catharsis and finally, healing.

Healing takes some time. We get McNamara’s self-exculpatory, yet not unsympathetic, musings, and vicious attacks on the design and the designer ( Ross Perot’s description is “some ugly black slab designed by an egg roll”). Grady Mitchell (Mr. Gibbs), a veteran with traumatic memories, and Phuong Tran ( Nina Yoshida Nelsen ), a refugee whose dead husband, a South Vietnamese soldier, will not have his name on the memorial, think it’s meaningless. But, young as she is, Maya Lin stands up for her design and her Asian heritage; Mitchell, Tran and McNamara visit the memorial and find some solace there as the two-note motif reappears. The opera ends with it resolved in a chord.

Robert Spano led the capable WNO Orchestra, which was behind a scrim on the Eisenhower Theater stage. Erhard Rom designed the blocky, no-frills set, leaving it to S. Katy Tucker’s black-and-white projections to provide salient details—the Portrait Monument; the church’s stained-glass windows, the helicopters over the rice paddies. Dede Ayite designed the costumes (the outfits of the congregation in “it all falls down” were the liveliest) and Mark McCullough did the lighting. Ms. Moran did her own blocking for “Chantal”; Mr. Robinson’s direction of the other three pieces was efficient if broad-stroked.

“Written in Stone” proved an ambitious and thoughtful way to mark two significant anniversaries, and to make the point, through all of these different voices, that the work is never done.

—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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Composer Christopher Cerrone and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann offer an updated, Americanized take on the Japanese director’s ‘Rashomon.’

By Heidi Waleson

Feb. 22, 2022 6:08 pm EST

Pittsburgh

‘In a Grove”by composer Christopher Cerrone and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann, which had its world premiere at the Pittsburgh Opera’s Bitz Opera Factory on Saturday, is all about atmosphere. Based on the Ryūnosuke Akutagawa story that inspired Akira Kurosawa’s renowned 1950 film “Rashomon,” the 60-minute opera’s moody, haunting score, laced with electronics, explores the uncertainties—multiple, conflicting testimonies—that are the hallmarks of the story and the film. However, its libretto insists on resolving the mystery, which the story does not.

The setting has been updated from ancient Japan to Oregon in 1921; other significant details have been changed as well. The Outlaw, Luther Harlow, sees The Settler, Ambrose Raines, and his wife, Leona Raines, riding through a mountain landscape left desolate by a wildfire. Luther decides that he wants Leona. He lures Ambrose into a grove with the promise of a hidden treasure, ties him up, and then goes back to rape Leona. Ambrose ends up stabbed to death. 

Seven testimonies—four from witnesses with fragmentary knowledge, three from the participants themselves—offer conflicting interpretations of what happened. Each of the three participants claims responsibility for Ambrose’s death. In the Japanese original, the woman having been raped is the core of the story, making honor—that of the woman and that of her samurai husband—a critical factor. In a modern feminist twist, the opera’s woman is given more agency. Leona saves herself from being raped; she tries to rescue her husband and intervenes in the fight between the men. Finally, the revelation that Ambrose has a weak heart as a result of rheumatic fever in childhood—the frailty in the relationship is his, not hers—becomes central to the unraveling of the mystery.

Mr. Cerrone’s score, for nine instrumentalists and electronics, opens with a wind-like wash of sound; the instrumental soundscape, with fragments of melody subtly woven into a foundation of percussion, remains alluringly and dramatically hypnotic. Vocal lines are direct and unembellished, often with repeated notes and a sudden drop into a lower register for just a syllable or two. Like the instruments, the voices are amplified and sometimes electronically manipulated and distorted, alerting the listener to the fact that a character may be lying, or remembering wrong. Turning points are carefully signaled: For example, when Leona realizes—or thinks she realizes—that her husband hates her, the pounding orchestration disappears to leave her voice nakedly and poignantly exposed. 

Four skilled young singers each sang two roles—a participant and a witness—with only slight changes of hair and costume. Baritone Yazid Gray gave Luther a harshness as well as the seductive allure that tempts Ambrose off the path, and he brought stolid clarity to the Woodcutter who finds the body. Andrew Turner’s lyrical tenor supplied Ambrose’s pathos and the directness of the Policeman who arrests Luther. Soprano Madeline Ehlinger was luminous and sympathetic as Leona and forthright as her mother, who describes her missing daughter as an aspiring botanist. Countertenor Chuanyuan Liu sang the Medium through whom the dead Ambrose tells his version of events with an otherworldly flourish; his final duet with Mr. Turner—two Ambroses together—was a high point. He also illuminated the brief role of the shy Priest who sees the couple on the road before they meet Luther. Conductor Antony Walker, working with the instrumentalists from a loft high above the singers, ably welded the ensemble together.

For the stage, set designer Mimi Lien placed a runway, marbled in black and white, down the center of the small, black-box theater, with the audience seated on both sides. A translucent panel, its utility unclear, bisected the runway and moved from one side of it to the other between testimonies. The only other set pieces were two glowing images of naked tree trunks, one on each long wall behind the audience, which also shifted position, sliding along the walls, between scenes. There were no props. Mary Birnbaum’s acute, choreographic direction told the story clearly, with the aid of Yuki Nakase Link’s ghostly lighting and Oana Botez’s monochromatic period costumes that hinted at Japanese shapes. The look of the show paid homage to the story’s Japanese origins, coexisting ingeniously with the opera’s more American style in its dissection of this young couple’s tragedy. 

—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).

A jazz cabaret take on the final hours of Socrates’ life. 

By Heidi Waleson

Feb. 15, 2022 5:04 pm ET

New York

In the face of death, why not celebrate life to the fullest? That’s the spirit of Taylor Mac’s “The Hang,” now playing at HERE. Its initial January performances were canceled along with the whole Prototype Festival, at which it was suppose to have its premiere, because of the Omicron surge; how appropriate that an irreverent, queer jazz cabaret should be the show that came roaring back to life. This ebullient depiction of the final hours of Socrates features wailing saxophones, over-the-top makeup and costume design (performer El Beh’s headdress of toadstools is just one delirious element), dancing, flirtation, comedy and, always, argument. With his white robe, typewriter and sober demeanor, Plato ( Ryan Chittaphong ) is the odd man out; clearly, his published account sanitized a much more colorful event. 

In “The Hang,” Mac’s Socrates, with a flower-covered cap, purple robe and gloves, and a flowing bow in his long beard, embraces the crimes for which he was condemned to death—impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens—which, in this interpretation, are code for open debate and gay sex. There’s a lot of material in Mac’s book and lyrics, and if you haven’t been studying the Greeks recently, you will probably miss some of the references and the jokes. No matter: The 100-minute show sweeps you up in its exuberant, joyous anarchy, propelled by the infectious, toe-tapping abandon of composer and music director Matt Ray’s jazz songs and interludes. 

The eight musicians regularly join in the stage action: In a song about virtue, saxophonist Jessica Lurie gets into a scatting contest with singers Kat Edmonson and Synead Cidney Nichols. Contemporary references, like the ensemble number built on the catchphrase “OK Boomer,” are dropped into the mix. Socrates recounts his trial in an arch, Noel Coward -style rhymed narration, complete with British accent (“It was gayer than Spartans . . . The three proseCUtors had sons who were SUItors”). There are darker moments, as when a black-cloaked trio swoops in to declare that “the party is over . . . run, little children, flush all the drugs,” and the ensemble becomes a chorus of Socrates’ accusers. And as the hemlock starts to take effect, and Socrates sheds his gay finery for a white shroud-like garment, Mac reminds us gently that “Wondering is all we do . . . wondering is holy.” 

But overall, “The Hang” is a romp about love, community and dialectics, and a showcase for a cast of dynamic performers, unleashed by director Niegel Smith and choreographer Chanon Judson. There’s the sweetness of the drag artist Wesley Garlington, festooned in orange macramé and whistling seductively to Socrates; the belting power of Queen Esther; the astonishing, lanky physique of Kenneth Ard, clad only in a harness and feather headdress; the intense dancing of Trebien Pollard (resplendent in orange rams’ horns). The costumes and the womb-like setting are by Machine Dazzle. Anastasia Durasova designed the makeup; Kate McGee, the lighting. The memory of color, momentum and joy remains even after the jazz funeral has left the stage and the dead Socrates asks Plato, “Am I to be a statue, then?” Not if this group has anything to do with it. 

—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).

The operatic adaptation of Lynn Nottage’s play marries the best of its love-and-loss narrative to Ricky Ian Gordon’s musical talents in Bartlett Sher’s production.

By Heidi Waleson

Updated Feb. 8, 2022 8:15 pm ET

New York

‘Intimate Apparel,” the touching new opera by Ricky Ian Gordon and Lynn Nottage now at Lincoln Center Theater, is a good advertisement for a long and productive creative lead time. Composer and librettist were brought together by the Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater New Works Program over a decade ago; the opera went through multiple workshops to refine Ms. Nottage’s adaptation of her 2003 play and Mr. Gordon’s musical interpretation. Scheduled to open in March 2020, the show was shut down by Covid-19 after three weeks of previews. Now running at LCT’s chamber-size Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, in a tight production by Bartlett Sher, performed by a splendid cast, “Intimate Apparel” is an elegantly constructed piece of theater in which music significantly expands and enriches the themes and emotions of the original play. 

Set in 1905 in New York, the opera is the story of Esther, a 35-year-old Black seamstress who creates lingerie for clients who include a rich white matron (Mrs. Van Buren) and a Tenderloin prostitute (Mayme). She lives in a boarding house with a sympathetic landlady (Mrs. Dickson) and has been diligently sewing her savings into a quilt for 18 years, planning to open a beauty parlor someday. She is illiterate, but with the aid of her clients, she carries on a romantic correspondence with George, a Barbadian laborer working on the Panama Canal; her longing for love is the chink in her armor of practicality and self-reliance. Esther’s true soul mate is Mr. Marks, the Orthodox Jewish fabric merchant with whom she bonds over the beauties of silk, wool and lace, but their relationship can go no further. Act I ends with a wedding, but in the second act, when an accelerating cascade of events shows George’s virtues to be an illusion, Esther is left to fall back on her own strengths. 

Ms. Nottage radically trimmed the play’s text, but also expanded it, creating subtly rhymed arias out of single sentences. There is no fat on the libretto—Mrs. Van Buren, Mayme, Mrs. Dickson and Mr. Marks each have just one brief aria that precisely establishes his or her essence and why that matters to Esther’s plight. The play was all two-character scenes; for the opera, an eight-member chorus enables the creation of larger episodes that were only described in the original, such as the opening party, which sets Esther’s solitude against the jolly ragtime antics of the boarding house, and the dice game in which George loses Esther’s savings. Ensemble members also sing shadowy backup parts in solos such as George’s letters, lending them extra depth. 

Episodes flow smoothly from one into the other, thanks to Mr. Gordon’s careful setting of the text, which segues effortlessly from expository conversation into arias and ensembles. The underlying momentum afforded by period styles like ragtime and blues never feels like affectation, and the two-piano accompaniment offers both tonal richness and percussive clarity that never overwhelms the voices. 

With her eloquent soprano, Kearstin Piper Brown conveyed Esther’s stoic dignity and reserve, making her disillusionment all the more heartbreaking. Baritone Justin Austin ably characterized George’s two faces: the passionate balladeer of Act I, wooing Esther in poetic letters that it turns out he did not write, and the real, much darker man of Act II who is illiterate, has a marked Bajan accent, and is more interested in his wife’s money than her love. Krysty Swann’s voluptuous mezzo brought a louche ease to Mayme; soprano Adrienne Danrich gave Mrs. Dickson’s motherly warnings to Esther (“Marry up”) extra force; mezzo Naomi Louisa O’Connell made Mrs. Van Buren’s boredom and disappointment sympathetic. Arnold Livingston Geis’s sensitive tenor poignantly expressed the loneliness of Mr. Marks; the rippling piano accompaniment sensually illustrated the love of beautiful things that he and Esther share. Conductor Steven Osgood and pianists Nathaniel LaNasa and Brent Funderburk skillfully coordinated the musical action from two platforms set high above the stage. Marc Salzberg’s careful sound design kept the balances steady and the text clear. 

Michael Yeargan’s spare turntable set made the music’s smooth scenic flow visual. Simple pieces of furniture—Esther’s sewing machine, the table on which Mr. Marks unrolls his luxurious fabrics, Mrs. Van Buren’s boudoir chaise longue—established each setting, and were quickly moved on and off by ensemble members. Catherine Zuber created the splendid period costumes, including Esther’s extravagant corset creations and the Japanese silk smoking jacket that symbolizes the downfall of her hopes. Jennifer Tipton did the atmospheric lighting; a few projections (59 Productions), such as a crowded street on the Lower East Side, came and went swiftly, letting the audience concentrate on the characters, their trials and dramatic arc deftly limned by Mr. Sher’s acute direction. In the intimate, 290-seat Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, gathered around the thrust stage, we seemed to be living in their world. 

—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).

Boston Lyric Opera and Opera Philadelphia collaborate on a film of Ana Sokolović’s work, about a group of women preparing their friend for her wedding day.

By Heidi Waleson

Feb. 2, 2022 5:41 pm

One of the most interesting creative developments resulting from the Covid-19 shutdown of live performance is the recognition that operas can work as films. Rather than the familiar video representations of staged performances, these projects are conceived for the screen, expanding the visual environments of the stories and even divorcing the physical process of singing from the characters on the screen. Boston Lyric Opera and Opera Philadelphia have pioneered individually in filmed opera; their collaboration on a film of Ana Sokolović’s “Svadba” (2011) is now available to subscribers on the digital channels of both companies at operabox.tv and operaphila.tv; on-demand viewing is $15. 

“Svadba” is a good candidate for film treatment. A riveting, 54-minute a cappella piece for six female voices and incidental percussion, it is about ritual and community rather than plot: Five women prepare their friend, Milica, for her wedding the next day. Alternately fierce, tender, playful and ecstatic, the friends coalesce around this monumental life transition. Ms. Sokolović’s libretto draws from Serbian poetry and folk tales, but much of the text is an invented, onomatopoeic, syllabic language. Carried by the tight harmonies and complex rhythms of the music, it makes its impact viscerally, rather than committing to literal meaning. 

The film, directed by Shura Baryshnikov, takes the idea a few steps further. Six singers recorded their parts in a studio, while five dancers and an actor ( Jackie Davis as Lena, here called the Elder) performed on location—a rustic beach house and its environs on Cape Cod. The camera cuts back and forth between the two, which is occasionally disconcerting until you figure out which of the singers is playing the bride (I watched it twice). Four bridesmaids wear diaphanous, sparkly tulle; the fifth, Lena, wears a plain dress with an apron—it’s her house. (Costumes are by Lena Borovci. ) The attendants gather flowers and grasses for bouquets and beach fruits for jam; they undress and dress the bride; they play games. In Hannah Shepard’s screenplay, the natural world is infused into these rites of passage.

Opening the piece up into the stunning landscape adds texture—Ana Novačić was the production designer and Katherine Castro the director of photography—though it also sometimes detracts from the almost claustrophobic intensity and intimacy of the vocal writing. In an early scene, Lena dyes Milica’s hair while the other bridesmaids dash outside, take off their dresses, and dance on the beach in their underwear; it seems odd that the six women are not all together. Other scenes cohere better. In one, the singers recite the Serbian alphabet and layer nursery rhymes as the dancers face off in a playful contest. And in the most magical sequence, the sun sets, and the bride goes out to the beach alone as the ensemble, with a bit of reverb applied, sings (in Serbian), “Wet your hair with stars.” Here, the physical separation on screen seems right—it is a nocturne and an incantation, fading into the sound of a rain stick, as Milica falls asleep on the beach beside the waves. At dawn, she is awakened, also magically, with the wispy sound of an ocarina, and the final preparations begin. 

The film’s casting also gives the piece new dimensions. The camera celebrates Victoria L. Awkward’s beautifully complicated Black hairstyle, with its multihued extensions, giving Milica’s hair-dyeing sequence extra resonance. It also interpolates a cameo appearance by a nonsinging Betrothed—who is a woman ( Olivia Moon ). There was an all-female production team as well as cast. The folk-based rhythms and harmonies, nonsense syllables, and vocal noises like lip trills and tongue clicks can make “Svadba” seem like a mysterious anthropological ritual from some exotic ethnic group. In the film, the identifiable location and the diverse cast make it feel both contemporary and timeless. 

The splendid vocal ensemble, conducted by Daniela Candillari, featured Chabrelle D. Williams, who brought anticipatory ecstasy to Milica’s big solo; Brianna J. Robinson, Maggie Finnegan, Mack Wolz, Hannah Ludwig and Vera Savage created a vibrant, varied tonal palette with wonderfully precise articulation of the syllabic material. In addition to Ms. Awkward and Ms. Davis, the dynamic onscreen performers included dancers Jay Breen, Sarah Pacheco, Sasha Peterson and Emily Jerant-Hendrickson.

Verdi’s opera gets a new staging from Bartlett Sher that moves the action to Weimar Germany in the 1920s.

By Heidi Waleson

Jan. 3, 2022 4:20 pm

New York

Amid the Omicron-related cascade of theater, dance and concert cancellations, the Metropolitan Opera’s New Year’s Eve show— Bartlett Sher’s new production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto”—went on as planned. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, gave a brief curtain speech thanking the company and the audience, and noting that thanks to the Met’s stringent health measures (“You have no idea,” he said wryly), none of its performances have been canceled. It was not business as usual, of course. The gala dinner was called off, there were some empty seats, and Mr. Gelb urged the audience members to keep their masks on. Still, there was plenty of festive attire and selfie-snapping, and Quinn Kelsey, who sang the title role, took his bows in a 2022 tiara as confetti dropped on the audience. Just when we started taking live performance for granted again, we were reminded how easily it could go away. 

That would be a shame, given the incandescent performances delivered by Mr. Kelsey and Rosa Feola as his daughter, Gilda. The opera’s principal characters can seem particularly unsympathetic—the court jester, the libidinous duke he enables, and the ditsy, easily duped daughter whom he basically imprisons. But Mr. Kelsey found unusual nuance in Rigoletto, both as singer and actor. His booming baritone has both volume and lyric poignancy, and he assorted those traits to create new sides of the character with every appearance. In the first scene, his voice scraped harshly as he did his job, taunting Count Ceprano with his wife’s infidelity. Alone in the next scene, he shed that mask along with his jester props—red gloves, black ruff—and ruminated about his own evil deeds with a soliloquy that encompassed both guilt and fear. In Act 2, when he implored the courtiers to tell him where they had taken his abducted daughter, you could hear that real begging did not come easily to him, and in the subsequent duet with Gilda, their mutual devastation was palpable. 

Ms. Feola also rose above Gilda’s vacuous innocence to create a character with some agency. Her luminous soprano made “Caro nome” more than just a star turn. It was thoughtful and deeply felt, and you sensed the character’s through-line, connecting her love for her father and this new feeling for a mysterious young man. Piotr Beczala’s Duke, on the other hand, was one-dimensional—vocally bright, hearty and focused on getting what he wants. Even “Ella mi fu rapita,” in which he suggests that Gilda could make him change his ways, offered no variety. 

Mr. Sher’s production, created in cooperation with Staatsoper Berlin, ostensibly updates the story’s Renaissance Italy setting to Weimar Germany in the 1920s, but there is little in Michael Yeargan’s set or Catherine Zuber’s costumes that conveys a strong sense of period, or why that period is thematically significant. The set, a giant cube, rotates on a turntable. In the first scene, courtiers wearing “old Hollywood” slinky dresses, uniforms or black tie spill through tall, narrow doors on all sides until the set comes to a stop, revealing a huge reception room with gold pillars and blood-red walls. Subsequent rotations take us to Rigoletto’s multistory house and the assassin Sparafucile’s den of iniquity—both generically impoverished, though the latter has a bar setup in the center. The set also turns in midscene on occasion. This supplies some drama, but more often distraction, upstaging the singers at critical moments. For example, when Rigoletto, dragging the zippered body bag containing what he thinks is the murdered Duke but is actually Gilda, suddenly hears the Duke singing, we’ve lost track of him and his horrified reaction because we are focused instead on the turning set.https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Mr. Sher’s directing also has mixed results. The opening party scene is lively and precisely choreographed to demonstrate the underlying violence and nastiness of the Duke’s regime. Little moments are telling: Rigoletto kicks Monterone’s cane out from under him and makes him fall; in Act 2, the courtiers do the same to Rigoletto. Giovanna, Gilda’s companion ( Eve Gigliotti ), is here made part of the conspiracy to destroy Gilda—she takes money from the Duke; watches, unfazed, as her charge is abducted; then leaves with a suitcase. The more nuanced theatrical characterizations of Rigoletto and Gilda also take this production out of the realm of the obvious. But there are more confusing choices as well, most notably the scene in which Gilda substitutes herself for the Duke as murder victim. During part of it, with the aid of some drenched red lighting designed by Donald Holder, she appears to be in two places at once. 

Andrea Mastroni was a businesslike Sparafucile, lacking some of the assassin’s menace despite his handsome, velvety bass; Varduhi Abrahamyan, a properly blowzy, assertive Maddalena, helped make the Act 3 quartet a vocal high point of the evening. Craig Colclough was a potent, disheveled Monterone. Conductor Daniele Rustioni proved a sympathetic accompanist to the singers, but he did not keep the score’s dramatic tension at a consistently. high level. In a way, the whole show suffered from that lack of pure animal energy—it was almost too subtle. “Rigoletto” is a barn-burner—you have to gallop along with the sexism, violence and sentimentality in order for it to work. In this production, despite some gripping theatrical and vocal moments, the all-consuming sense of tragedy was missing. 

—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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