Given a choice, I prefer to concentrate on pipelines with positive outcomes. How can you tell the difference between a good pipeline and a bad pipeline? Just remember this critical moment from 1939's hit film, The Wizard of Oz.
Founded in 1998, the National New Play Network (NNPN) now has programs devoted to annual commissions, playwrights in residence, producers in residence, and an international exchange.
- Since its launch in 2006, NNPN's annual MFA Workshop for Playwrights -- a joint venture with Stanford University’s National Center for New Plays and the Kennedy Center's Education Department (The American College Theatre Festival) -- has been linked to 70 Master of Fine Arts programs throughout the United States. As a result, some of the scripts that were developed during annual MFAPW gatherings have received fully-staged productions at NNPN's member theaters.
- Its program devoted to rolling world premieres has helped produce more than 50 new plays with over $1 million in support funding.
- NNPN's New Play Exchange is a cloud-based database of new works designed to "flip the script on how new plays get shared and discovered by revolutionizing the way playwrights, theater-makers, and theaters connect field-wide."
- A joint project with the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation, the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival, and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, NNPN’s National Directors Fellowship is a five-year program designed to propel the advancement of new plays while fast-tracking the professional experience of 25 emerging stage directors.
After many years in Washington, D.C., OPERA America relocated its offices to New York. In 2012, the organization unveiled the National Opera Center. In 2014, it helped the financially-stricken San Diego Opera navigate a crisis in a way that prevented the company from going under.
New technologies ranging from social media to teleconferencing, from online ticket sales to the streaming of live events have revolutionized a 400-year-old art form that can occasionally seem mired in tradition. With the advent of the Internet, the Metropolitan Opera is no longer the only industry voice with a microphone. Whereas the Metropolitan Opera Guild's house organ, Opera News magazine, was once the dominant source of operatic news available to American audiences, OPERA America's expansive collection of videos on its YouTube channel includes sessions from its opera conferences for professionals, its Creators in Concert series, an Emerging Artist Recital Series, and the popular Conversations with Artists hosted by Marc Scorca (the organization's Executive Director for more than 25 years).
For the past half century, the most likely places in America to attend an operatic world premiere would have been at the following four companies:
- During Julius Rudel's administration, the New York City Opera commissioned 12 new operas and Rudel conducted the world premieres of 19 operas. With support from the Ford Foundation, City Opera presented one season comprised entirely of American operas; Rudel also conducted numerous American premieres.
- Founded in 1955, the Houston Grand Opera has been responsible for 43 world premieres (ranging from Nixon in China to a mariachi opera) and six American premieres.
- Since its debut in 1957, the Santa Fe Opera has commissioned 10 new operas, presented 11 international premieres, and staged the American premieres of 44 operas.
- Launched in 1976, the Opera Theatre of St. Louis has staged 14 world premieres including The Postman Always Rings Twice, Champion, Twenty-Seven, and Shalimar the Clown. Among the 14 American premieres presented by OTSL are Paul Bunyan, The Voyage to Rheims, and three operas by Japanese composer Minoru Miki (An Actor's Revenge, Joruri, and The Tale of Genji).
With stronger bonds between academia, the professional opera world, and the general public, there is now a much larger community at hand to help support the birth of new operas. Bay area audiences recently witnessed two new works at opposite ends of the creative pipeline. In one situation, an operatic workshop gave a sense of a new work's potential while, in the other, a full-blown production received its world premiere from one of America's leading opera companies.
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Under the leadership of its General Director, Sara Nealy, and musical director, Michael Morgan, Festival Opera is in the process of preparing a new opera by Chinese-born American composer-librettist Wang Jie for its world premiere late in 2017. Entitled Rated R for Rat, this new work deals with a collection of gods (represented as the characters in the Chinese Zodiac) and a population of demoralized humans struggling to cope with the mountains of waste they have created. |
| Poster art for Rated R for Rat |
In collaboration with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and a renowned incubator of contemporary works (American Opera Projects), Festival Opera held a 90-minute workshop in which three scenes were prepared and sung by young artists. The cast featured bass-baritone Cody Quattlebaum (a recent graduate of the San Francisco Opera's Merola Program and a current graduate student at the Juilliard School) in the title role and Ricardo Garcia as the Rooster. Two voice students from the Conservatory filled out the ensemble, with soprano Alexandra Gilliam cast as the Lark and mezzo-soprano Jasmine Johnson as a peasant woman. Working with the singers was stage director Mo Zhou, who had recently provided the composer with a valuable insight.
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| Director Mo Zhou and composer Wang Jie (Photo by: Mike Kirwan) |
Rated R for Rat is designed as an expansion of Jie's previous chamber opera, From the Other Sky. Now conceived as an "eco-opera," it applies the laws of supply and demand toward the future of the human race as well as the fate of the gods.
The opera is set in the near future, when humans are so depressed and malnourished that, as they struggle to breathe through heavy smog and make their way through mountains of industrial waste, they must also deal with a horrible plague. As a result, birth rates have dropped precipitously (which bodes ill for Rat's business).
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| Composer Wang Jie |
Just as Wagner's gods in Der Ring des Nibelungen cannot retain their youth without Freia's apples, the gods in Rated R for Rat need earthlings to supply them with human placentas in order for the gods to survive. When Rat sends the Lark (who is the 13th Zodiac Goddess) down to Earth to learn why humans are nearing extinction, the Lark witnesses the human misery, experiences compassion, and discovers that the combination of her divine voice and the soulful music of the doomed humans might offer the key to keeping both sets of creatures alive.
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| The cast and creative team during the talkback held at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (Photo by: Mike Kirwan) |
During the talkback which followed the musical part of the workshop, Wang Jie explained how she came up with the idea of having the soprano portraying the Lark alternate between singing (when she is talking to the gods) and whistling (when she is trying to communicate with humans. One rarely hears a soprano give a shout-out to her grandfather for teaching her how to whistle!
Thanks to an Art Works award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the workshop was able to be livestreamed. You can watch the event in its entirety in the following video clip (be sure to click the "X" to unmute the sound).
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In 2008, the San Francisco Opera presented the world premiere of The Bonesetter's Daughter. With music composed by Stewart Wallace (who had worked with David Gockley on the world premieres of 1989's Where's Dick? and 1995's Harvey Milk at the Houston Grand Opera) and a libretto by Amy Tan (who wrote the novel upon which the opera was based), the production achieved several goals that were more practical than aesthetic.- At a time when subscription sales were weakening and single ticket sales were increasing, a new opera based on a story by one of San Francisco's famous authors helped to attract new audiences from the Chinese-American community.
- The casting of Chinese and Chinese-American artists (Zheng Cao, Ning Liang, Qian Yi, Hao Jiang Tian, Wu Tong) as well as a creative team featuring stage director Chen Shi-Zheng, choreographer Wang Yuqing, aerial choreographer Ruthy Inchaustegui, costume designer Han Feng, and three Chinese percussionists, demonstrated that the opera company was actively pursuing Asian talent.
- The extensive publicity generated in the media helped to inspire fundraising from Asian-American individuals as well as the Chinese-American business community.
- The world premiere benefited from San Francisco's longstanding sister-city relationships with Shanghai and Taipei.
In looking for a followup-project, Gockley turned his focus to Cao Xueqin's classical novel, Dream of the Red Chamber. After pulling together a creative team that included composer Bright Sheng, playwright David Henry Hwang, director Stan Lai, designer Tim Yip, and choreographer Fang-Yi Sheu, plans were solidified to co-produce the new opera with the Hong Kong Arts Festival.
Because Bright Sheng is the Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, it was easy for him to use some of the students in his music department for a workshop of this new opera.
While some people worried about whether or not Sheng's opera would do justice to the legacy of Cao Xueqin's immensely popular 18th-century novel, that was of little concern to me. When Winnie Holzman adapted Gregory Maguire's novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, for the libretto to Stephen Schwartz's popular musical (Wicked), entire subplots were dropped from the narrative. Wagner spread his tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen, over four operas containing 19 hours of music. Imagine trying to squeeze a tale as complex as the Bhagavad Gita, Mahabharata, Odyssey, Iliad, or Aeneid into a 2-1/2 hour stage presentation!
I was much more interested to see what the creative team would deliver from the perspectives of music, stagecraft, and design. Tim Yip's costume designs were often breathtaking to behold.
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| Princess Jia (Karen Chia-ling Ho), Granny Jia (Qiulin Zhang) and Lady Wang (Hyona Kim) in a scene from Bright Sheng's Dream of the Red Chamber (Photo by: Cory Weaver) |
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| Irene Roberts as Bao Chai in Bright Sheng's new opera, Dream of the Red Chamber (Photo by: Cory Weaver) |
Yip's scenic design employed a series of layered drops which could be adjusted to suggest different locales (in some cases, the blue-lit cyclorama visible between painted elements of the drops could be adjusted to suggest a river running through a village).
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| A scene from Bright Sheng's new opera, Dream of the Red Chamber (Photo by: Cory Weaver) |
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| A scene from Bright Sheng's new opera, Dream of the Red Chamber (Photo by: Cory Weaver) |
Guiding the audience through the narrative is a Monk/Dreamer (Randall Nakano), who tries to explain how, after being left behind during the construction of Heaven, Stone and Flower sought to fulfill their love by traveling through a magic mirror to Earth and attempting to live as mortals. Following their journey, Flower became Dai Yu (Pureum Jo), a frail young woman who arrived in the home of the Jia clan (one of the Dynasty's wealthiest families).
Stone became the male hair to the Jia clan, Bao Yu (Yijie Shi), a spoiled rake born with a piece of jade in his mouth. After Bao Yu's older sister was elevated to the rank of Princess Jia (Karen Chia-ling Ho), Dai Yu and Bao Yu fell in love. Although they felt like soul mates,, complications soon arose. While Granny Jia (Qiulin Zhang) encouraged Bao Yu to marry his true love (Dai Yu), Lady Wang (Hyona Kim), was busily scheming for him to marry Bao Chai (Irene Roberts), instead. That way the Xue family's wealth could help to erase the Jia clan's debt to the Imperial Court.
While the first act of Sheng's opera may be heavy with musical and narrative exposition, the shorter second act is lush with romantic music which is easily accessible to Western audiences. Curiously, the men's voices are limited to the tenor range, which makes Dream of the Red Chamber one of the rare operas lacking a bass or baritone of any importance.
With George Manahan conducting, the principal singers were notable for some exceptional voices and fierce diction. I was particularly impressed by Pureum Jo's beautiful soprano and Yijie Shi's flexible tenor. In smaller roles, contralto Qiulin Zhang was a profoundly sympathetic Granny Jia while Karen Chia-ling Ho brought a lush soprano to the role of Princess Jia. Irene Roberts offered a sensitive portrait of Bao Chai. However, as Lady Wang, Hyona Kim's powerful mezzo-soprano and threatening stage presence allowed her to steal the show
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| Hyona Kim as Lady Wang in a scene from Bright Sheng's Dream of the Red Chamber (Photo by: Cory Weaver) |
Since the San Francisco Opera's video capabilities allow it to record each production, I hope that Dream of the Red Chamber will eventually become available on DVD. It's a beautiful piece of music theatre.
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