The pandemic wiped out the 2020 season of
Opera Theatre of St. Louis (OSTSL), but
they’re back in business this year. There are fewer performances,
fewer seats, none of the operas run over 75 minutes, and it all
happens on a newly constructed stage taking up what is usually the
company’s main parking lot. They’re not down and out, just downsized
and outdoors.
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Over the Edge
Photo by Eric Woolsey |
With highly successful productions of Puccini’s
Gianni Schicchi,
William Grant Still’s
Highway 1, U.S.A, and
Poulenc’s
La voix humaine
already up and running, OTSL seems to have saved the best for last
with the
New Works, Bold Voices Lab. It’s a varied and
consistently entertaining evening of three world premiere one-act
operas which, as OTSL General Director
Andrew Jorgensen said in
an interview last month,
were “actually designed with very small orchestral forces in mind…so
they could be performed during the pandemic.”
Running around 20 minutes each, the three operas are all radically
different in style, and yet they complement each other quite neatly.
As Stage Director James Robinson writes in his program note in the
OTSL app, each creative team was asked to think about the question,
“what is on your mind and how are you feeling about the world right
now?”. He describes their answers as “incredibly rich and varied”—a
statement with which I heartily concur.
The evening opens with
On the Edge, with music by
Laura Karpman and a libretto by
Taura Stinson, both of whom have
extensive credits outside of the opera house/concert hall orbit. A
five-time Emmy Award winner, Karpman has written extensively for
television, film, theatre, and various newer media platforms.
Stinson is
described by OTSL as a
“multi-hyphenated visionary,” which seems appropriate for someone
who works as a vocalist, producer, composer, songwriter and author.
Together, they have created a seriocomic reflection on the first
three months of the COVID-19 pandemic from the points of view of a
single mom (in April 2020), a mother working from home (May) and,
finally, a classic nuclear family in June trying to find hope amidst
the worsening pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the
increasing miasma of violence and aggressive authoritarianism
unfolding on their TV.
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Moon Tea
Photo by Eric Woolsey |
The first two scenes are fast-paced and witty, echoing (but never
imitating) influences as diverse as Stephen Sondheim and Phillip
Glass. You can hear the former in Stinson’s clever lyrics and the
latter at the end of the first scene, in which Single Mom’s growing
frustration, the demands of children Kadin and Kyra, and homework
reminders from their teacher explode in a chorus of wildly
overlapping vocal lines that coalesce in the refrain “We are stuck /
in the muck / WHAT THE…”.
No, the last word isn’t actually sung. It’s funnier that way.
The second scene opens with a simple canon on the word “Zoom” sung
by Mama, Mommy, and Son 1 to express the daily routine of lockdown
and a life lived online. Other phrases are added in (“Getting fat,
fat,” “It goes on and on”) and the vocal polyphony becomes more
complex as Grandma starts to chime in with a confused mix of fact
and fancy about the pandemic. The scene slowly winds down with a
return to the original canon, suggesting that nothing will change
anytime soon. Which, of course, it didn’t for most of us.
The shift in tone that comes with the more anguished and
borderline-preachy final scene seems odd at first, but only until
one reflects on the fact that the outrage at Floyd’s murder was
amplified by, “[a] pandemic, and a captive audience, / For the world
to catch a glimpse of our pain.” And the combination of pain, hope,
and determination expressed in the closing quartet is both moving
and inspiring. “Hold on!” they sing. “And all the fallen stars, / We
will speak your names.”
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Moon Tea
Photo by Eric Woolsey |
The 13 named roles in the three scenes are played by the
impressively versatile quartet of soprano
Monica Dewey, mezzo
Mack Wolz, mezzo
Melody Wilson, and bass-baritone
Calvin Griffin (who is also making his
OTSL debut). Wilson is a particularly familiar face on the local
scene, having appeared with both OTSL and Union Avenue Opera over
the years.
The mood shifts towards Monty Pyton-esque surrealism in the second
opera,
Moon Tea, with music by
Steven Mackey and a libretto by
Rinde Eckert. Mackey’s eclectic
compositional style—often heard at
St. Louis Symphony
Orchestra (SLSO) concerts during the tenure of former Music
Director David Robertson— meshes quite well with the imaginative and
whimsical words of the multi-talented Eckert (a composer, singer,
actor, and director as well as a writer).
Moon Tea is a fanciful and slightly loopy imaginary version of a
real-world event: an
awkward 1969 meeting
with Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip. and Apollo 13 astronauts Neil
Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, along with their wives.
The Queen was unenthusiastic about the project, Armstrong was
suffering from a terrible cold, and Collins (as Aldrin would reveal
many years later
on Twitter) “almost
fell down the stairs trying not to turn his back” on the Queen.
It was not a great moment for the Anglo-American alliance, and the
farcical nature of the simple facts of the event appealed greatly to
Mackey. “I’m a sucker for fish-out-of-water stories,” he confesses
in comments
on the OTSL YouTube channel.
“The music just flowed out.”
Mackey’s musical toolbox is as eclectic as Karpman’s, although in
his case that eclecticism stems from a background in rock and pop.
He and his long-time collaborator Eckert were members of the band
Big Farm and have teamed up on many projects in the past. As a
result, both the music and words of
Moon Tea seamlessly
unite to create a whimsical sonic world that combines unorthodox
elements such as
microtonality and
oddball percussion instruments like the
flexatone with more
conventional techniques without any hint of a conflict.
Ingenious touches include the ragged sneeze rhythms that repeatedly
interrupt Neil Armstrong’s vocal line, the slightly demented,
not-quite-a-waltz theme that serves as the basis for the dreamlike
scene in which Queen Elizabeth imagines herself Queen of the Moon,
and the elaborate, rapid-fire patter song that illustrates Michael
Collins’ awkwardness. If Gilbert and Sullivan were still with us,
they would have loved it.
That said, I found
Moon Tea to be amusing, but not
particularly involving.
Moon Tea is facile and often
brilliant, with plenty of playful stage business and clever use of
digital animation by designer Craig Emetaz, but at around 20
minutes it’s as long as it needs to be.
Still, congratulations are due the performers, all of whom fully
inhabit their roles. Monica Dewey is properly regal Queen Elizabeth,
Melody Wilson a cheerfully celebrity-obsessed Janet Armstrong, and
tenor
Jonathan Johnson a
pleasantly fatuous Prince Philip. Tenor
Michael Day rattles off his tricky
patter song with the assurance of a latter-day
John Reed and
Jarrett Porter’s weighty baritone lends
dignity to the afflicted Neil Armstrong.
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The Tongue and the Lash
Photo by Eric Woolsey |
The program ends with the most emotionally powerful opera of the
trio,
The Tongue and the Lash, with music by
Damien Sneed and libretto by
Karen Chilton. A singer,
instrumentalist, and conductor as well as a composer, Sneed’s
background is wide-ranging, spanning the worlds of jazz, pop, and
R&B along with the classics, while Chilton is an actor and
writer as well as a classical pianist. The result of their
collaboration packs a serious punch.
Like
Moon Tea,
The Tongue and the Lash is inspired
by a real event: the 1965 debate between author and activist
James Baldwin and
conservative intellectual gadfly
William F. Buckley, Jr.
on the premise that “the American dream is at the expense of the
American Negro.” It is, perhaps, a sign of the times that the vote
declaring Baldwin the winner was 544 to 164 instead of, say, 708 to
zero.
The opera, which takes place in the Cambridge University Union after
the verdict has been rendered, imagines what a post-debate
conversation between Baldwin and Buckley might have been.
Baldwin is portrayed with vocal power and gravitas by baritone
Markel Reed. In long vocal lines that
carry the weight of authority and conviction, he declares that “I
have made plain my case” but then asks, “what victory is there /
When all our suffering and injustice is laid bare?” When, at one
point, Baldwin’s music turns into a passionate gospel hymn on the
words “Time is all we’ve got,” the effect is electrifying.
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The Tongue and the Lash
Photo by Eric Woolsey |
The contrast with Buckley’s music could hardly be stronger. Where
Baldwin glides, Buckley skitters. His vocal line dances around to a
rapid, slightly discordant accompaniment in a strikingly effective
musical equivalent of what the New York Times obit called the real
Buckley’s “use of ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers
loved to compare to an anteater’s.” Jonathan Johnson perfectly
captures Buckley’s trademark supercilious attitude and deftly
negotiates the character’s sometimes florid passages.
All three operas share the same eight-piece ensemble of St. Louis
Symphony Orchestra members: first violinist Xiaoxiao Qiang, second
violinist Janet Carpenter, violist Leonid Plashinov-Johnson, cellist
Elizabeth Chung, and double bass Erik Harris. The sizeable
percussion battery consists of Shannon Wood on timpani with Alan
Stewart and Thomas Stubbs on everything else. Composer/conductor
Daniela Candillari, who leads a special
SLSO concert on June 24th, is on the podium. Their performance of
this varied assortment of new and challenging music was a joy to
witness.
Opera Theatre of St. Louis’s exceptional 2021 season continues
through Sunday, June 20th on the Webster University campus. For more
information, visit
the company’s web site.
