Opera in the Heights is ready to get back on the stage
Opera in the Heights is back. The regional company that launches emerging talent toward bigger stages turns 25 this year, with a hybrid season of in-person and virtual performances. Bouncing back from various pandemic-related pitfalls took longer than expected, says artistic director Eiki Isomura.
Still, he hopes their upcoming performances of Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” and Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” will prove worth the wait.
“Ultimately, returning to Lambert Hall is the thing that’s going to help us reestablish ourselves as the company that our patrons have loved and supported, says Isomura. “It was important for us to reestablish our presence there.”
Currently, the company is scheduled to return to its longtime home on Heights Boulevard for four fully staged performances of “Trovatore” between Nov. 13 and 21; four more of “Onegin” follow between April 2 and 10, 2022. (Individual tickets aren’t on sale yet, but season-ticket packages start at $190.) Seating capacity will not be limited at the theater, which has been outfitted with several HEPA air filters, and Opera in the Heights will comply with the city of Houston Health Department’s COVID recommendations — whatever those turn out to be.
“Generally speaking, there’s a lot we can’t really predict in terms of how those recommendations will evolve between now and November, and we’re going to always adapt,” says Isomura.
“But what we expect is masking and temperature-check requirements at the door.”
When COVID struck, Opera in the Heights was just days removed from wrapping its 2020
New Works Festival. The company was about to start rehearsals for “Onegin”; “Trovatore” was booked as the 2020-21 season opener. Rather than start fresh with different productions, Isomura says he’s been “mostly successful” in getting the cast and crew of those shows to return this season.
“By mission, we are very artist oriented,” he says. “We exist to provide a stage for these artists who deserve work. We made these offers for what would have been role debuts, really important credits for these artists, and these productions got canceled.
“We could have just paid out these artists in full and moved on and said, ‘Let’s come up with new programming,’ (but) we knew that it was always going to be more valuable to bring them back,” he adds.
Isomura weighed adding a third live production this season but thought better of it.
“We don’t know what to expect in terms of participation from our audience,” he says. “We can venture a guess based on surveys, but at the end of the day, delta’s out there and we don’t know what that will do to the audience’s appetite for these in-person experiences. So for that reason, we have to rein in, to some extent, the size and quantity of our offerings.”
Opera in the Heights has hardly been idle during the downtime. Its resident artists performed highlights of “Lucia di Lammermoor” and “The Marriage of Figaro” last April at White Oak Music Hall, whetting their appetite for singing in front of an audience.
It also joined eight other U.S. opera companies in the Decameron Opera Coalition, whose shortfilm anthology “Tales From a Safe Distance” drew kudos from the likes of OperaWire and the Library of Congress.
The coalition’s second volume, “Heroes,” will debut Oct. 1 and remain online through Dec. 31. The project aims to recognize the reality that “some of the heroes we have lionized in the past may no longer make sense as our heroes today,” as Isomura says, and suggest lesser-known figures to fill that void.
Opera in the Heights’ contribution is “Unsung Activist,” a biographical piece about Eldrewey Stearnes, who played a key role in desegregating Houston in the early 1960s and died last year. The film stars Steve Wallace, the Chicago-based operatic tenor who is also a hip-hop/R&B producer and performer.
“He drew his own storyboards, he wrote the music (and) created the backing track,” Isomura says. “He’s also singing the lead role and oversaw the recording process with the sound engineer. His Renaissance man-dom was very much on display, and I’m just in awe of his talent.”
After months of uncertainty about the company’s future, his recent conversations with patrons have been quite encouraging, says Isomura.
“Generally they tell us, ‘We just want to see Opera in the Heights make it through thist,’ ” he says. “We’ve taken that as our patrons’ blessing to make responsible choices and to not go too big too soon but to give them the product that they’ve known us to present. I think spirits are really good.”