InSeries: Peek at Their Commissioned Opera—Delta King's Blues

 

The InSeries of Washington, DC, noted for its updated classic opera productions, has commissioned an opera by composer Damien Geter and librettist Jarrod Lee. The opera titled Delta King’s Blues debuted January 26, 2025, as a workshop at the Martin Luther King Library in the Nation’s Capital.

 

 

The story is based on the myth that an unknown blues musician named Robert Johnson rose to celebrity status because he sold his soul to the devil when his pleas to God went unanswered. The devil then teaches Johnson how to play his steel-stringed guitar.

 

Five outstanding singers are cast in the following roles:

 

Robert Johnson (tenor): Curtis Bannister

The Devil (bass): Dr. Carl DuPont

Virginia (soprano): Melissa Wimbish

Willie (baritone): Marvin Wayne Allen

Son (tenor): Jonathan Pierce Rhodes

 

Johnson was considered a ladies’ man who was a loner, leading an itinerant life going from town to town where he usually had a woman who would look after him. One of these women appears in the Opera: the 14-year-old girl he married in 1929, but who died not long after in childbirth. Another woman (but not in the opera) that he had an off-and-on relationship with over a ten year period had a son named Robert Lockwood, Junior. Lockwood learned to play guitar from Johnson as well as stage presence and timing. By the age of 15, he traveled with Johnson and was referred to as Robert, Junior. Lockwood’s father and mother divorced, and Johnson was an unofficial stepfather to Lockwood. The character Son in Delta King’s Blues is most likely Lockwood.

 

Johnson’s mother had married twice but neither husband was Johnson’s biological father. With her first husband, the family lived in Memphis for eight or nine years, where Johnson was educated in such subjects as arithmetic, reading, language, music, geography, and physical exercise. Johnson’s education made him different from other Delta blues musicians, because he was literate and exposed to jazz, country, and other forms of popular music. His mother’s second husband was named Will "Dusty" Willis and was called Will. Will lived in the Mississippi delta. While the singers did a reasonably good job of articulating the words of the libretto, it was unclear to this audience member if the character Willie was meant to be Johnson’s 2^nd stepfather. Johnson died from an unknown cause in 1938 at the age of 27.

 

In the scant program notes, the libretto synopsis states that Johnson tries to “impress Willie, Son and Virginia” with his playing of a steel stringed guitar named Stella.” “Willie” might also refer to another blues musician. What’s clear is that this 45-minute work involves artistic license relative to the truth of Johnson’s story.

 

Geter’s complex dissonance-infused blues music is built on well-known songs by Johnson such as “Cross Roads” and “Come on in My Kitchen.” Music Director Emily Baltzer accompanied the singers with an agile and masterful piano performance. The quality of the vocal performances was excellent, particularly Curtis Bannister as Robert Johnson and Dr. Carl DuPont as the devil. This reviewer longed to hear more of the female voice. The only female singer was the impressive Melissa Wimbish, cast in the limited role of Virginia. The producers of this workshop did not include a talk-back session. Instead, the event offered a fundraising reception that followed the performance. This reviewer hopes that the piece will continue to develop. It is off to a strong start.

 

 

 

WNO Mini Operas Given Red Carpet Debut

 Washington National Opera presented three 20-minute opera premieres January 18, 2025, in their twelfth anniversary American Opera Initiatives program. In this learning laboratory that included sets and costumes, WNO staff headed by Artistic Director Francesca Zambello and General Director Timothy O’Leary paired three composers with three librettists. Mentors assigned to these creative teams were the prolific opera composer Greg Spears (Castor and Patience) and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith (librettist of Castor and Patience). The works were performed by excellent singers in the Cafritz Young Artist Program and the Washington National Opera Orchestra conducted by George Manahan, who has premiered hundreds of operas. The director was Chloe Treat.

 

The three mini operas were:

 

—Tati by composer Kyle Brenn & librettist Lex Brown

—Cry, Wolf by composer JL Marlor & librettist Clare Fuyuko Bierman

—Mud Girl by composer Omar Najmi & librettist Christine Evans

 

The orchestra for all three operas provided a variety of interesting textures, especially involving percussion instruments. The mildly dissonant music seemed summoned from the same nickelodeon. Was this musical sameness a consequence of the preference of the vetting team that selected these composers, an influence of a mentor, or something else? 

 

 

Two of the stories Tati and Mud Girl deal with environmental issues. Tati concerns three people living inside a whale. Why they are there and how they plan to escape their current situation is too confusing and complicated to describe. The stage prop representing the sick whale’s heart co-exists in the space where the three are trapped. Swallowing plastic bags is a factor as to why the whale is sick.

 

 In an apocalyptic world, Mud Girl involves two women living under a bridge in a relationship that functions almost as mother and daughter. River, the younger woman, is lonely and thus constructs Poly to be her friend. River makes Poly out of mud, plastic and AI-infused trash that includes things like smart water, smart bombs and smart garden gnomes. Poly is played by two women dressed alike who cling to each other like Siamese twins. River’s mother-figure Maude, formerly a scientist, warns River against the flotsam delivered by a flood that presumably made them homeless.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cry, Wolf is a more straight forward look at young men and their self-images as they try to attract the opposite sex. The story features two college boys, one full of bluster who says he is a wolf. He howls to make his point and claims that is the way to attract women. The other college boy has no self confidence and believes he is ugly. His younger brother still in high school shows up for a visit and tries to shake his brother out of his self-hating torpor.

O’Leary and Zambello say in their introductory letter that some mentors have “confided that they feel the 20-minute form is more challenging than a longer work.” This gives rise to the question: will any of these 20-minute operas ever be produced again? This year for the first time, these three short operas will be staged on January 23rd in New York City at the Kaufman Music Center’s Merkin Hall. For these composers and librettists to work with such accomplished singers and musicians in two prestigious venues—Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and New York’s Kaufman Music Center—under the guidance and sponsorship of WNO, a major American opera company, is a major boost to their career paths.

 

 

Photos Bronwen Sharp

New Operas Online from Opera America

 

In their New Works forum, Opera America on January 16, 2025, showcased via YouTube, selected samples of four developing operas:

 

·      Faces in the Flames — Nathan Felix, composer; Anita Gonzalez, librettist

·      Monkey: A Kung Fu Puppet Parable — Jorge Sosa, composer; Cerise Lim Jacobs, librettist (White Snake Projects)

·      My Dearest Friend — Patricia Leonard, composer

·      Ululations and Gurgles of the Invisible — Elisabet Curbelo, composer (Guerilla Opera)

 

It was an exceptionally engaging set of new works.

 

The Dresser’s favorite Faces in the Flames saw six singers, a pianist, a cellist, and a violinist present tonal music that was dramatically impressive. A soprano and mezzo conveyed the music with a chorus of four. The libretto tells the story of Thomas Askew (1847-1914), an African American photographer who images  captured a true-to-life picture of Blacks in that period. Unfortunately, Askew’s studio and his work perished in the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917. Presented were three excerpts. 

 

 

 

Monkey: A Kung Fu Puppet Parable included an actor, two singers (countertenor and dramatic soprano), a pianist, and a Bunraku-style puppet master and puppet.  The music was tonal and powerful. The title of this work adequately provides what the story entails. The puppet master was highly accomplished, but he did not steal light from the music or the other performers which could have easily been the case. The overall presentation was a fine balance of talent.

 

My Dearest Friend featured one singer and a piano. The music was lyrically tonal and pleasing. The overall impression was an old-school opera and a rather quiet one. The libretto conveys the love story of John and Abigail Adams.

 

 Ululations and Gurgles of the Invisible is an experiment in the camp of John Cage. Based on poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, it is a four-part work of which excerpts from three parts were showcased by a soprano, percussionist, pianist, and dancers. The Dresser would associate this work with performance art since it had to do with exploring silence in the world of those using sign language. It also incorporated motion sensors on the bodies of dancers.

 

The program can still be viewed at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PRdO79I5bA.

 

In its 2024–2025 season, OPERA America Onstage is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. The programming at the National Opera Center where this showcase took place was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

 

A Peek at Fidelio

 

 

The Dresser was unexpectedly invited by a friend to the October 23, 2024, dress rehearsal of Washington National Opera’s new production of Ludwig van Beethoven’s only opera Fidelio. It’s frowned upon to review a production that is seen in rehearsal and so the Dresser will mainly discuss what has been released to the public and what is historic.

 

Beethoven had a lot of problems with this opera, which premiered in Vienna on November 20, 1805. He revised it three times. Originally called Leonore, oder Der Triumph der ehelichen Liebe (Leonore, or The Triumph of Marital Love), the opera was cut from three acts to two. It contains some music that was written for an opera Beethoven never completed. Numerous librettists worked on this opera starting with Joseph Sonnleithner who adapted the story from the French by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly. It was shortened by Stephan von Breuning and edited by Georg Friedrich Treitschke.

 

The story, set in two acts, and running two hours and 45 minutes with one 25-minute intermission, involves a woman who disguises herself as a young man to gain access to her imprisoned husband Florestan.

 

Florestan exposed crimes committed by his political rival Pizarro. In a prison that he governs, Pizarro then secretly incarcerates Florestan. Florestan’s wife Leonore, disguised in male attire, gets hired as Fidelio  by Rocco, a man who works for Pizarro. Both Rocco and his daughter Marzelline take an immediate liking to Fidelio. Courted without interest by Jaquino, Marzelline gravitates quickly to Fidelio and the idea that Fidelio will marry her. Rocco agrees and counsels Fidelio that he must earn a good salary.

 

Meanwhile, Fidelio asks to support Rocco with his work in the dungeons that he oversees.  Pizarro appears and Rocco warns him that the Prime Minister Don Fernando will pay the prison a surprise visit. Pizarro asks Rocco to kill Florestan who for two years has been starved under Pizarro’s orders to Rocco. Rocco says no. Pizarro answers he will kill Florestan, but Rocco must dig a grave in the floor of the dungeon to bury Florestan.

 

The outcome is Rocco allows Fidelio to help dig the grave. Don Fernando arrives in the nick of time to stop Pizarro from murdering Florestan who is being bravely protected by Fidelio now revealed as Leonore.

 

The dress rehearsal proved interesting as several people huddled over their own (well-lit) copies of the score, furtively taking notes. The photographer, a thin, agile man kept moving swiftly through the roped off seats near the stage and often crossing the rope to achieve a larger perspective for his shots. The invited audience was sparse and not enough critical mass to warm up the Kennedy Center’s Opera House. A three-page handout, with a list of cast and creative team as well as synopsis of the story, warned audience that:

1.        Singers might not sing in full voice.

2.        Audience must stay seated until a break is announced, and house lights shine.

3.        Audience must not talk during a stop for corrections or repeat.

4.        Audience must not use cell phones or recording devices of any kind.

 

WNO Artistic Director Francesca Zambello is this production’s director. This production opens with projections that look like newspaper headlines. The role of the Prime Minister (Don Fernando) originally scored for a baritone is sung by mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves wearing a white pants suit. 

 

About the opera, Steiny wonders why Beethoven made Leonore/Fidelio a soprano and not a mezzo? While it is true that many summaries of the libretto describe Fidelio as a boy, the story indicates a young man well over puberty who attracts a marriage-eligible young woman with another suitor and a young man capable of brave acts. In fact, Beethoven had no mezzos at all cast for his opera.

 

Steiny thinks the ensemble singing is masterful and beautiful, but Steiny wonders why Fidelio has music  that never expresses any of the darkness of its subject matter.

 

Steiny suggests you make what you want of this information.

 

Fidelio, in German with projected English surtitles, is at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Opera House October 25 to November 4, 2024.

 

 

Between the Temples—A Case of Happy Chaos

How many mothers does a man need? The Dresser asks this question after meditating over Nathan Silver’s film Between the Temples.

 

In this comedy cum drama, a cantor loses his ability—or certainly, his will—to sing after his wife dies. He is such a mess of grief; he moves back into his mother’s basement. His artist mom Meira (Catherine Aaron) has a wife named Judith (Dolly De Leon) whom Cantor Ben (Jason Schwartzman) also calls Mom, and these two women are prominent contributors to the synagogue where he is employed. This means that Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel) will not fire him. Ben attempts to perform and when he cannot, he flees on foot to a highway where he lies down in the road and expects a massive truck to run over him. However, the horrified truck driver stops and then takes him to a local bar. There, the bartender keeps filling him up with a chocolate drink called a mudslinger. Think of the bar tender as a pun because Ben has regressed to an age that precedes his bar mitzvah, the Jewish coming of age ceremony for a boy which involves reading the Torah.

 

At the bar, he encounters Carla Kessler O’Connor, his grade school music teacher (Carol Kane). While he struggles to escape her, she becomes the only one who can bring him back to his full manhood. Voila, he finds his third or fourth mother, if we count his deceased wife who left him a legacy of dirty talk through her phone messages to him.

 

Carla decides that she wants a bat mitzvah, the equivalent coming of age ceremony for Jewish girls, to make up for the lack imposed by her parents. For she was a red diaper baby, a child brought up without religion by Jewish communists. Indeed, Carol Kane in her baby-fied Goldie Hahn-like voice made the Dresser believe Carla’s need to rectify this childhood deprivation. Ben says no he can’t teach her, but she says, yes, you can and so does Rabbi Bruce.

 

Meanwhile, everyone pitches in to matchmake. His moms introduce him to a woman who, at first, they suggest is a shrink. She is a doctor but a cosmetic surgeon. Unbeknownst, to Ben, Mom Judith then signs him up for a JDate and so an eager woman named Leah in a very short skirt blocks the entrance to his temple. Rabbi Bruce sends his beautiful daughter Gabby who, though suffering from a recent heartbreak, musters the energy to summon the voice of his late spouse and put into action a sexual act suggested by the wife’s dirty talk. Happily, the director spares us from an immersive scene.

 

However, it is only the belly rub to encourage deep breathing by Carla that moves the cantor. After that, he invites himself to her house to show her his bar mitzvah video which happens to be the same Torah portion she is studying for her bat mitzvah. Pretty soon he becomes an uninvited overnight guest (with no access to Carla’s boudoir) sleeping in the pajamas of Carla’s adult son Nate. Nate and his family show up that next morning and encounter Ben. Nate, a psychiatrist, is aghast at seeing Ben attired in Nate’s intimate wear and demands a meeting with his mother to talk things over.

 

It's this one-scene-that-leads-to-the-next from crisis to crisis that keeps the film in a state of happy chaos. It’s much like what a new mother experiences in having a baby. In this case, Ben is the helpless baby. You might say in retrospect that what happens in this film was very funny, but first you must get through the grief and confusion to experience that belly laugh. It’s a mind game, as suggested by the film’s title.

The End of a Nazi Monster on June Zero

A disturbing juxtaposition of youth and death underpins June Zero, a film based on the 1962 execution of Adolph Eichmann in Israel. Eichmann was a major Nazi organizer of the Holocaust and therefore considered one of the worst mass murderers of World War II. Mossad agents abducted him from Argentina and brought him to trial in Israel. This film by Jake Paltrow (brother of actor Gwyneth Paltrow) is a story where young people fill adult  roles.

 

On July 24, 2024, the Dresser saw a screening of this hard-to-find American-Israeli film, which was released internationally July 1, 2022, but has only been available in United States theaters since June 28, 2024. The one-hour-forty-five-minute movie, shot entirely on 16mm film, is a drama in Hebrew and Spanish. Paltrow’s use of the low-budget 16mm film associates the movie with those made for documentary purposes. Given that the availability of  the inexpensive 16mm film in the 1960’s allowed amateurs to make movies,  the Dresser sees the director’s choice to use that medium in synch with the emphasis on telling this story from immature points of view.

 

The overall story of June Zero is bookended by the stories of two teenage boys. The film opens with David (Noam Ovadia), a thirteen-year-old Libyan immigrant. While he and his family are Jews, they speak Arabic and there is no hint that he is being prepared for the manhood ceremony of bar mitzvah. David tends to steal things and inappropriately interrupt his schoolroom and teacher. He gets suspended from school, so his father decides David should get a job. He takes him to a man with a reputation for killing Arabs who has a company making ovens. Metaphorically interesting, David’s father, just before they enter the oven factory, exchanges his shoes for David’s sandals. Thus, David is now walking in  men’s shoes. David, despite his youth and his arrogance, excels and becomes part of a secret project to construct a crematorium that will dispose of Eichmann’s body once he is hanged. (The Israelis did not want Eichmann in death to have a martyr’s shrine. His cremated remains were, in fact,  dumped beyond the Mediterranean territorial waters of Israel. The title of the film June Zero also reflects Israel’s insistence that the date of Eichmann’s demise would not be known and therefore never celebrated.)

 

The other story of a teenage boy is told by Micha Aaronson (Tom Hagi) who survives the Auschwitz concentration camp and provides evidence against Eichmann. In the film, he is now a man retelling the story of being whipped 81 times as a teenager in the Warsaw ghetto for not burning the bibles he was forced to collect. The location of this retelling is the postwar Warsaw Ghetto. A woman who apparently cares for Micha advises him to refuse to keep telling that story because he shouldn’t be a victim forever. However, Micha is stuck in his past as a horribly abused teenager. He needs to keep retelling the story for himself, so that he knows he has been heard and believed. What he has not come to terms with since that beating is the meaning of justice. He asks his friend, “What does justice mean?”

 

The center piece of the June Zero story belongs to the Moroccan-born guard Haim Gouri (Yoav Levi) who is charged with keeping Eichmann alive until his execution. It is Gouri who visits the fearsome oven factory owner Shlomi Zebco (Tzahi Grad) to assign him the secret task of making the crematorium which will reduce Eichmann to dust. Hounded by journalists, Gouri suffers an automobile accident after the factory visit which, while it doesn’t keep him from watching over Eichmann, causes him paranoid hallucinations like those a new mother would experience with an infant . At one point, Gouri, intent on keeping  Eichmann alive for the justice of the hangman’s noose, thinks for a horrifying moment that Eichmann has died in his sleep. For Gouri, Eichmann has become his immature child. In this way, the central story has the specter of a youth with a shadow of death hanging over him.

 

Remarkably, Paltrow and his co-writer Tom Shoval, have made Eichmann a faceless figure in the film. We see his feet first and then we see the back of his head when a barber comes. This is much to Gouri’s consternation, because he fears that this man with scissors will kill his charge. In the film credits, the actor who plays Eichmann gets no recognition.

 

The standout actor in this film is Noam Ovadia who plays David. Our last image of him as a youth is when he is sacked by Shlomi Zebco who says his factory is no place for a boy. David fires back, “I love the factory and I’m better than all your workers.”  Zebco tells him, “You’re just a kid. Get out.” The film ends with an adult David trying to convince an Israeli historian that he was involved with the cremation of Eichmann. He cannot produce any evidence, and she holds fast that she cannot accommodate his request to be included in that history. Here Paltrow and Shoval tie up a loose end—the involvement of a boy in building Eichmann’s crematorium may be nothing more than a myth.

 

Zavala-Zavala, the opera that cuts to the heart

Zavala-Zavala

 

Imagine you are fleeing violence in your country. In the middle of your first night in the country where you seek safe haven, agents in uniforms snatch your child and won’t give him back. Then you are arrested and put into an orange jumpsuit. You face deportation for incorrectly entering the country at the wrong place, a crime normally considered a misdemeanor.

 

In real life, Navidad Zavala-Zavala, a Honduran grandmother who had been raising her seven-year-old grandson, faced this situation. In 2017, hers was the first family separation case in El Paso, Texas, testing Trump’s Zero Tolerance directives.

 

The initial spark for Zavala-Zavala: an opera in V cuts came in 2017 from Brian Arreola, father of two young children. He was moved deeply by what was happening at the United States southern border. Working with librettist Anna Deeny Morales, he completed Zavala-Zavala, his first opera,  in 2022. The work was developed and premiered by the IN Series at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. The production was supported by a Faculty Research Grant from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, where Arreola is Professor of Voice and Opera Workshop.

 

On June 23, 2024, the Dresser saw Zavala-Zavala, an hour-long chamber opera, in its second production as presented by Gala Hispanic Theatre under the direction of  Corinne Hayes.

 

Arreola’s collaboration with poet and librettist Anna Deeny Morales was an inspired arrangement. Her talent as a poet shines through Navidad’s heartrending story which is told in V cuts—or five wrenching scenes—in both Spanish and English.

 

She tells the boy
of how the gods made

mist and light,
the jaguar night,

palms and waves,

the continent bends,

hills of trees,

jungles, leaves,

animals, insects,

and all that is free . . .

and then . . .
and then . . .

 

Deeny Morales, who teaches at Georgetown University’s Center for Latin American Studies, is an accomplished artist with substantial networks. Her operas have been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Georgetown Americas Institute, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Zavala-Zavala was supported by the Ford Foundation. Her opera Las Místicas de México about the more than 110,000 disappeared in Mexico was a collaboration with the IN Series artistic director Timothy Nelson (among others).

 

Arreola’s music is accessible and tuneful. The ten-piece, on-stage orchestra, under the baton of the composer, provided a satisfying net of sound that both supported and accented the richly nuanced voices of the outstanding singers. Baritone Efraín Solís featured in the role of Sergio Garcia, the lawyer representing Navidad Zavala-Zavala, also sang the parts of narrator and judge. His role switching was as seamless as his acting was confident. Mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Mondragón (as Navidad Zavala-Zavala) sang with authority and confidence that one would hope for in a woman who has made such an arduous journey and who needs to assure a young child that her love and her embrace will protect him. Perhaps the hardest role to deliver was that of prosecuting attorney Sara Morales as sung by soprano Judy Yannini. The challenge was to reduce the stridency of her job against the upper range of her voice. Sara’s duet with Sergio asking her to think about her children as the Thanksgiving holiday approached helped moderate the fierce person the job required her to be. Boy soprano Abraham Latner as the Niño (grandson of Navidad) capped off the stellar performances as he sang heartbreakingly (in Spanish) about the hummingbird that he asks to carry his message of love to his family, that they should not forget him.

 

 

The original production at the Kennedy Center featured an 18-piece orchestra. The Gala Hispanic Theatre production had six fewer strings, no flute, and no percussionist, and included piano, harp, oboe, bass clarinet, bassoon, and French horn. The sound seemed robust and full to this reviewer, without covering the voices.

 

The Gala Hispanic Theatre production had three performances. The last was filmed and was attended by members of the Zavala-Zavala family. Navidad’s grandson was reunited with his mother, but Navidad remains deported. The creators hope to circulate the new film footage to educate citizens of the United States about the cruelty of separating children from their families.

 

 

Photos by Camilo Montoya