Opera Philadelphia captures a new audience
PHILADELPHIA—“If you don’t love, respect and educate your children . . . they will kill you.”
As I looked around at my fellow audience members in Philadelphia’s Wilma Theatre the other evening I saw a surprising (to me) number of heads nodding up and down.
Really? They will kill you? I had never before heard that terrible thought expressed.
Then again, I had never before sat through We Shall Not Be Moved, a chamber opera by Daniel Bernard Roumain and Marc Bamuthi Joseph inspired by a May 1985 standoff between a radical group and Philadelphia police, culminating in an aerial bombing of the group’s rowhouse headquarters and the killing of 11 African-American members, five of them children.
Directed by the renowned American choreographer Bill T. Jones, We Shall Not Be Moved focused on five North Philadelphia teens on the run and their confrontation with a young, conflicted police officer, herself a Hispanic woman. A multimedia work, it uses dance, spoken text, video projections and a musical score incorporating classical, rhythm and blues and jazz elements to address issues of race relations and individual responsibility.
It was receiving its world premiere that night as part of the 017 Festival opening Opera Philadelphia’s season and the “surprising” remark I heard was spoken by one of the opera’s creators during a post-performance panel discussion attended by a majority of the audience.
Opera, a museum art? Not this time. Audience member after audience member spoke up recounting personal experiences related to the opera’s subject. On that night in Philadelphia, opera and real life became one.
David Devan could hardly have been more gratified. Recruited from Pacific Opera in Victoria, where he had been general manager, the Toronto-born administrator (a Canadian Opera Company alumnus) was six years ago given the general directorship of an established traditional company in a major American city that was seeing its public greying and its box-office numbers diminishing.
Housed in one of North America’s few real opera houses, the elegant 19th-century Academy of Music, Opera Philadelphia was a company with an honourable past and questionable future. “Opera is not broken,” Devan nevertheless explained in his downtown office. “It is very much alive. What we have to do is demonstrate that we are part of the city, not above it.”
That is where the new 017 Festival comes in.
True, the 12-day, 31-performance event included a standard repertory opera presented in the company’s historic house. But even this production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute was brilliantly different, imported from the Komische Oper, Berlin and innovatively staged in the style of a 1920s film, complete with no fewer than 647 video cues and silent movie-style projected English texts replacing the German spoken dialogue.
Los Angeles Opera and Minnesota Opera will also be seeing this production, evidence that producers across the continent are looking for fresh ways of introducing traditional opera to a broader audience.
Not that Opera Philadelphia is abandoning its veteran subscribers. The current season also includes a mainstage presentation of Bizet’s Carmen as well as George Benjamin’s Written On Skin.
But most of 017 took place off the mainstage. The premiere of The Wake World by composer-in-residence David Hertzberg and director R. B. Schlather took place in the spectacular art museum setting of the Barnes Foundation, in part because one of the opera’s characters happens to be the museum’s visionary founder, Albert C. Barnes.
And the even more spectacular setting of the Philadelphia Museum of Art played host to War Stories, a double bill of Monteverdi’s Il combatimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, performed in a medieval stone cloister, and Lembit Beecher’s I have No Stories to Tell, a 21st-century response to Monteverdi’s 17th-century opera, performed on the grand staircase of the museum’s Great Hall. In common with a growing number of companies, Opera Philadelphia is clearly seeking partnerships able to bring opera to non-traditional stages. We Shall Not Be Moved will subsequently be produced by its co-commissioners, the near-legendary Apollo Theatre in Harlem and England’s Hackney Empire.
Moreover, Pulitzer Prize-winner Kevin Puts’ ambitious Elizabeth Cree, co-commissioned and produced with Hackney Empire and co-produced with Chicago Opera Theatre, was given its world premiere in the Kimmel Centre’s playhouse, the Perelman Theatre.
With the maraschino cherry of a recital by opera diva Sondra Radvanovsky atop this sundae, Opera Philadelphia’s 017 Festival represented an innovative and daring way to open an opera season.
May its example prove to be inspirational.