Souls go wandering in ‘If I Were You’
“If I Were You,” the new opera by composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer that had its world premiere on Thursday, Aug. 1, is about a guy who stumbles onto a magic formula for transferring his soul into the bodies and the lives of others. And like that guy, the piece itself often seems unsure just who it wants to be, trying on this identity and that in a search for dramatic cohesion.
It’s a little bit “Faust,” a little bit “Flying Dutchman” and a little bit “Freaky Friday.”
“If I Were You” marks the first time the Merola Opera Program — the San Francisco Opera’s summer training arm for young artists — has commissioned a new work, and the choice of Heggie was simultaneously obvious and inspired. His operatic catalog, beginning with “Dead Man Walking” in 2000 and continuing through last year’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” is like a master class in elegant, canny vocal writing and am
bitious theatricalism.
Perhaps even more to the point, he has a gift for tailoring his music to the specific requirements at hand — in this case, writing for an ensemble of young singers in a way that lets individuals shine without calling on anyone to be a virtuoso headliner.
The new score, for all its dramatic foibles, rises beautifully to those expectations. Thursday’s performance in Herbst Theatre, conducted with eloquent fluidity by Nicole Paiement, revealed a work of inventiveness and expressive urgency.
There’s a recurrent melodic figure, a perfect symbol of the wheels of time and fate that form the libretto’s central imagery, which appears in the first minute of the piece and immediately lodges in the listener’s brain. There are a host of miniarias, each one confidently shaped and subtly contoured to its purpose. The orchestral writing is richly textured, with a lush overlay atop brisk, tautly structured rhythms.
Yet all of it is in the service of a story that keeps urging us to take it more seriously than it deserves. The protagonist, a young fellow by the name of Fabian, awakes in an ambulance after a car crash to find himself attended by a weirdly demonic EMT named Brittomara. She tells him that for the price of his immortal soul, he can acquire the ability to transform into anyone he wants just by murmuring a palindromic incantation.
In the hands of a more serious and interesting person than Fabian, this might have been a gift worth exploring. But even though we’re evidently expected to regard him as a tormented young Romantic, a latterday Werther, the evidence is pretty clear that Fabian is merely a numbskull.
By the time the curtain has fallen on the first act, he’s used his gift to escape a chewing out from his boss by
becoming his boss, and then to evade a crime scene by becoming the investigating police officer. If those are the best uses he can think of for black magic, then his soul might not have been worth all that much to begin with.
Instead, “If I Were You” turns out to be an odd but fascinating portrait of Diana, the love interest that Fabian, in his doltish way, keeps trying to get next to. There’s no reason for us to believe that she would actually fall for the man she can somehow discern underneath the various physical guises Fabian presents, and there’s certainly no reason to believe that she would sacrifice her own soul to redeem him (unless it’s out of a Wagnerian belief that that’s what women are for). And yet, Diana emerges as the most compelling and radiant character onstage, a vision of hope whose optimism never cloys.
That’s due in large part to the bright and superbly evocative music Heggie gives her, with arching melodies that settle into shimmeringly sunny harmonies. And on Thursday, in the first of two casts dividing this fourperformance run, that glow was also a function of soprano Esther Tonea’s magnificent singing — an ardent, tonally plush performance that took every vocal challenge Heggie handed her and dispatched it easily.
If Diana’s character note is her steadfastness, the Mephistophelean Brittomara is a constant shapeshifter, and mezzosoprano Cara Collins moved with practiced ease among the character’s various personas, from satanic dealmaker to passiveaggressive bartender to (in a hilariously nimble patter aria) a fasttalking hairstylist from the boroughs.
Tenor Michael Day gave a sensitive but somewhat recessive performance as the original Fabian, giving way to a succession of alter egos that were well handled, by Rafael Porto, Timothy Murray, Edward Laurenson and Brandon Scott Russell. Soprano Patricia Westley was a vivid, tender presence as Diana’s best friend, and mezzosoprano Edith Grossman teetered entertainingly as a harddrinking goodtime girl who for some reason winds up on the wrong end of a gun.
The production, staged by director Keturah Stickann, makes ingenious use of the cramped stage of the Herbst, with just enough lighting and sound effects to make it possible to track the progress of souls. But none of it quite explains why this story needed to be told, and in quite this way.
When Hollywood tackles the ageold business of soul transfer — not just in “Freaky Friday,” but in “All of Me” and “Ghostbusters” and others I’m not thinking of at the moment — they do it for laughs, because the premise is inherently ridiculous. To imagine that it tells us anything deep or lasting about humanity is a stretch.
But even though we’re evidently expected to regard him as a tormented young Romantic, the evidence is pretty clear that Fabian is merely a numbskull.