'24-'25: Performance #6
Modern Opera, Done Right
Performers:
Cast; Chabrelle Williams (as Claudette Colvin), Jacqueline Echols McCarley (as Rosa Parks, Ms. Nesbitt, and the Prosecution Attorney), Jazmine Olwalia (as Jo Ann Robinson, and Fred Gray), Cierra Byrd (as Jeanetta Reese, Classmate 1, Policeman, and Judge), Adrienne Danrich (as Susie “Mamma Sue” McDonald), Maya Davis (as Aurelia Browder), Melissa Joseph (as Mary Louise Smith, and Classmate 2)
Orchestra; Kelly Kuo (conductor), Qianwen Shen (Violin 1), Julia Choi (Violin 2), Nicolas Mirabile (Viola), Mitchell Lyon (Cello 1), Georgia Bourderionnet (Cello 2), Pawel Knapik (Bass), Meghan Bennett (Flute), Yasmina Spiegelberg (Clarinet), Patricia Wang (Bassoon), Matt Ward (Percussion), Justine Hines (Percussion), Jason Wirth (Pianist and Coach)
Program:
An Opera Concert/Orchestral Workshop for the in-development production, SHE WHO DARED, by Jasmine Arielle Barnes (Composer) and Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton (Librettist), commissioned by the American Lyric Theater.
Position: Orchestra side, front; the basement of the DiMenna Center is small, so even the seats in the rear provide good sight and sound lines.
Purpose/Intent/Questions: Like more folks than one might imagine, I love opera, and I am rarely satisfied with opera. InsightALT engages the community in witnessing and contributing feedback to operas currently being developed by up-and-coming composer-librettist teams. Because I was going to be in the City, it was an obvious choice for me to come and see if this story–about the women of the Montgomery bus boycott movement–might come to life in a way that many of the “tried and tested” operas refuse to on contemporary stages.
How’d it go?
Wow.
It’s already clear that I’m not going to shut up about this one for a while–possibly not ever. Remember the names Mouton and Barnes. Remember their names. I’ll remind you if you ever happen to forget; they’ve earned an instant evangelist for their work.
First, I should mention what exactly an “opera workshop” is and how it differs from a fully staged production, as one would get with a ticket to a show at the Met.
Because a full production of an opera is astronomically expensive, it isn’t uncommon to hear “opera concerts,” or excerpts from operas, performed by symphonies with hired soloists. As with these more familiar opera concerts, singers for a workshop dress nicely, though not necessarily as their characters–certainly not in the case where one singer is voicing multiple roles–and they perform in a fixed position without “acting” or otherwise moving about a set that simply isn’t present. It’s just the musicians, the lyrics and the instrumentation, the meat and potatoes, or the integral core of what an opera needs in order to establish itself as an entity within the genre. It’s my assumption that when this opera debuts in Chicago in June, costuming and set will be realistic and period appropriate. At some point in the future, someone might create radically different staging that takes the story of SHE WHO DARED, set in Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement, and sticks it up in space, making it about an interplanetary bus boycott and dressing everyone up in silver lamé–stranger things have happened in opera. I feel in my gut of guts that She Who Dared will survive long enough to see the good, the bad, and the ugly of full operatic collaboration.
In a professional opera concert at a symphony, singers will typically have their pieces memorized, but it’s not unheard of to see printed lyrics–they often come in the program book so the audience can follow along. In the workshop, it’s understood that the work isn’t even finalized in the minds of the creators, so printed materials for the performers are a given. These are all professionally, classically trained singers–no randoms pulled off the street with the hope that they might be able to carry a tune. While the orchestra is small, they are also professionals.
After the performance, which includes a screen for supertitles (captions and translations as pertinent, including staging notes and similar that would be found in the libretto or score), InsightALT engages the audience in a guided feedback session so that the librettist and composer can have their questions about their own work answered, giving them the opportunity to consider and reconsider aspects of the opera before it is born, delivered in its fully staged debut, with members of the press ready to review.
When something is as gripping, as beautifully done, as perfect as this when it’s still in the “drafts” folder, it’s almost impossible to consider that it won’t utterly rock the opera world.
I laughed. I cried. I prattled on to my mother–the person who gave me my real civil rights education, despite it being part of the curriculum at the “good” public schools I attended.
While it isn’t expected that the singers “act” at this point–they are, again, limited to a fixed position on the stage, standing to sing and sitting back down when it’s their turn to listen… some folks can’t help but bring excellence into everything they do. Aside from deliriously wonderful voices, each singer present embodied the character or characters she was assigned with so much conviction that it was not only easy to keep track of who everyone was, even when shifting between multiple roles assigned to a single singer, but it was difficult to separate the voices of the historic characters from their respective performers. Intellectually, I know that Rosa Parks probably didn't have that precise gorgeous silky long-line top that Jacqueline Echols McCarley wore. I know that there weren’t any buses in the basement of the DiMenna Center. I knew that even though Chabrelle Williams is young, she’s not as young as Claudette Colvin was at the start of the story. But good art manifests a world within the world we exist in. Sometimes we forget that anything exists beyond the story.
That happened for me.
The work is concerned with opening up some of the asterisks scattered throughout the lackluster curriculum, not to deny Rosa Parks her significance, but to tell the whole story.
“She wasn’t even the first to do it. It was planned!” Why is it that whenever I hear that, it’s in a snide voice, rather than an enthusiastic one?
As if that made it less brave, less of a story worth telling, less consequential for Rosa, less terrifying. As if an organized movement of resistance to social injustice was in some way less meaningful, less deserving of attention, than one magical Black woman somehow ending segregation by refusing to stand up.1
But Mouton and Barnes don’t just take up the story of Colvin, the original Black woman–Black girl–who was arrested2 for her refusal to give up her seat on the bus, though her story is multitudinous enough to stand alone. Her voice could fly solo any day, her voice that crafted such powerful remarks as “History kept me stuck to my seat. I felt the hand of Harriet Tubman pushing down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth pushing down on the other.” Instead, they start with Colvin’s spark and cover the slow beginnings and eventual raging wildfire of the bus boycotts, looking into the lives of the women involved, the difficult decisions they had to make individually and collectively, and the interplay between the deeply personal and the unavoidably political.
They didn’t pull punches, speaking to violence committed by the police against these women and girls, putting the whole of the disgusting legal drama on display, delving into the complicated emotions of a dark-skinned pregnant teenager being usurped by a more sympathetic victim, invoking the bombing of churches and King’s home. There was one rather young girl present with her mother in the audience, but I don’t think she came away traumatized. Because all of this material was handled with deep care and respect for the dignity of the greater human story.
In the brief break between the performance and the feedback session, my mind became fixated on scenes of buses. Not city buses, but yellow school buses. Not just in Alabama, but across the nation. It was all too easy to imagine them… busloads of high schoolers, pulling up to the opera house for what had surely become a rite of passage in their school, their district, their state, their country: the tenth-grade field trip to see She Who Dared. A first opera for many, if not most, they file in… joking, as folks always will, but quickly find themselves spellbound by a performance they can understand, both in terms of the language of the libretto, its articulation, the musical sense of the score, and a subject matter they have at least dabbled with before. When they exit, it seems quickly forgotten. But not by all of them. Bits of songs appear and reappear in classroom conversations. Students are caught humming in the hallways. It might not ever be “cool” to have an opera stuck to your ribs. But some kids will remember it, and think with it. This is one of those formative memories, something that changes something, something that starts something.
Various opera companies have programs to expose underserved youth, even elementary school students, to this odd artform of artforms. But there are dozens of reasons it doesn’t seem to have a lasting impact on individuals. Opera is demanding to experience, even when you’re in a cushy seat the entire time. I have seen many excited newcomers–relatively cultured, educated adults–slink away during intermission, frustrated by their inability to keep up with something that everyone else appeared to just “get” through weird opera osmosis that had passed over them.
“Accessible” is considered by many to be a diss when describing an opera. But all of the best operas are accessible, or at least they were born that way. Maybe you don’t know French, but Bizet certainly expected that his fellow countrymen, attending Carmen, most likely would.3 Beyond that, despite the totally “unrelatable” aspects4 of the story, it’s fundamentally about something even toddlers have lived experience with: wanting something, badly, and not getting it because we live in a world where other people also want things and we lack the decency of hermit crabs, especially when it comes to romantic love.5
If anything, on these grounds She Who Dared is slightly inaccessible in that it requires at least a base level of American history knowledge that I’d imagine is scarce beyond the United States, while sadly not even being unanimously present within the country. But I’d also imagine that someone visiting from Germany could read the libretto or a plot summary beforehand and then follow along far better than the average first-timer can handle Die Frau Ohne Schatten.
What I’m saying is, I feel like I have finally witnessed the murmurings–the spark–of a real culture of American Opera, all of the stories that started here and haven’t been told with all the glory, investment, detail, and demands that opera requires. I wouldn’t have expected this to be the piece, but in retrospect, I’m not surprised. Even though it is absurdly difficult for new operas to succeed and find champions beyond their debut, I am convinced.
But is it good art? Is it engaging for adults?
That one child in the audience was the only person present who couldn’t legally buy Barnes and Mouton a bottle to pop and toast to their coup, and yet I wasn’t the only person who laughed, who cried, who stayed for the feedback session with nothing more productive to contribute than boundless praise.6
In particular, I was struck by Barnes’ gift-cum-skill in articulating crisp emotion through the instrumentation. It’s rare that I witness musical comedy–even in pieces that I know are supposed to produce a chuckle at certain points, it’s not uncommon for professional ensembles to play past the joke. Similarly, Mouton has a tremendous sense of how to texture the story within the soundscape, alternating between levity and gravity as naturally as a buoy rides a wave. It’s heavy subject matter, and plenty would argue that she has every right to bludgeon the audience with it. But the reality is that people only survive things of this sort with the bit of breathing room provided by a joke or a song.
I can’t wait to see and hear the full production of She Who Dared–I’ve been doing all sorts of schedule-yoga to see if I might make it to Chicago early enough this summer to offer my witness–and I can’t wait to see and hear what Barnes and Mouton create next, once the wheels of this opera are set in motion, rolling onward towards a place in the new repertoire.
Of course, many narratives are flattened in this way. I’ve fallen into some of those simplifications in my lifetime and have needed to learn my way out of them. Again, I’ve been privileged by the parents and larger family I come from. I was taught to question things, for sure, but in pursuit of truth, in pursuit of nuance, in pursuit of something to admire for real. Seeking flawed heroes is always more worthwhile than seeking a reason to dismiss someone.
Her juvenile record was only expunged in 2021.
All the more can this be said of Prosper Mérimée, who published the work that would become the basis for Bizet’s opera.
Been a really long time since any bullfighters hit on me…
This is one accusation that “right-wing religious Jews” might get to sit out on. In communities where shidduchim are the default, it’s actually quite common for a friend to suggest someone who was lovely, but not an appropriate match. You might even have someone suggest a friend during a floundering date. In my experience, this is in pretty significant contrast to the secular world.
Those of you who frequent the same artistic circles I do are well aware of my intense disdain for people who refuse to give Black women who have earned their way into competitive programs honest, thorough, thoughtful critique on their work because they don’t want to actually think about it. There just weren’t any problems with the opera. The only meaningful questions were about direction and what the creators wanted the piece to do more or less of.