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San Francisco Chronicle
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘Harvey Milk Reimagined': What works and what doesn't in revised Opera Parallèle production
'Harvey Milk' is back. No, not the legendary civil rights activist, who was assassinated after becoming the first openly gay elected official in California history, but ' Harvey Milk Reimagined,' a heavily revised version of composer Stewart Wallace and librettist Michael Korie's 1995 opera. San Francisco Opera co-commissioned the original, performed here in 1996. Now, three decades later, Opera Parallèle — the local company that has made a mission of staging works by contemporary composers — is presenting the West Coast premiere of 'Harvey Milk Reimagined,' as part of a co-commission with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. This production, which had its opening performance at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' Blue Shield of California Theater on Saturday, May 31, comes at a timely moment, when the civil rights of transgender and other LGBTQ people are being challenged in the United States — a contrast to the hope that infuses Milk's story. The message of the opera is ultimately uplifting, even if the telling is at times harried. Korie has trimmed the libretto, which covers Milk's life from his childhood to his assassination by fellow San Francisco supervisor Dan White, While he removed a swath of secondary characters and a good amount of repetitive text, the libretto manages to retain many interactions and scenes. Still, the result feels too compressed and overstuffed, crammed with so much incident in its two hours that Milk himself, here portrayed by the sweet-voiced baritone Michael Kelly, feels out of focus. There's a lot of throat-clearing and scene-setting before his character is settled in San Francisco and running for office. Wallace's highly eclectic and fast-moving score contributes to the sense of trying to do too much. The revised opera starts with Harvey's Mama, tenderly sung by mezzo-soprano Catherine Cook, lecturing her young son (a star turn by tenor Curtis Resnick) about the Holocaust and being Jewish over a choral setting of the Mourner's Kaddish. Themes of identity overlap right from the beginning, as do musical styles. Mama also warns about 'men who are different' and reminds her son to come home right after the opera he's attending. From there, the score is constantly on the go, full of jagged rhythms and awkward text-setting. Sometimes this works — the scene with young Harvey at the opera, wondering who 'Tessa Tura' might be, is hilarious and evocative — but more often it feels rushed. Moreover, Ben Krames' sound design was far too loud, with each of the principal singers overamplified, blunting their portrayals and covering much musical detail in the 30-piece orchestra. (In a theater seating only 800, with a small orchestra, why amplify at all?) 'Harvey Milk Reimagined' is at its best when it takes its time: in the scene introducing Milk's lover Scott Smith, flamboyantly portrayed by tenor Henry Benson; in a loving late-night duet between Smith and Milk; and especially in the beautiful closing scene after Milk is murdered. The revision casts the role of the Messenger as a countertenor rather than a baritone, and Matheus Coura's supernaturally beautiful voice and striking presence in the part brought real magic to the close. Soprano Chea Kang as supervisor Henrietta Wong contributed a gorgeous solo there as well. Act 2 is more focused and covers Milk's emergence on the San Francisco political scene. Here his interactions with Mayor George Moscone, who was also murdered by White, and then-supervisor Dianne Feinstein provide insight into Milk's character and strategic abilities. Bass Matt Boehler and soprano Marnie Breckenridge, respectively, eloquently brought these politicians to life, with Breckenridge's additional brief turn as a Castro prostitute vividly jumping out of the mass of secondary characters. Tenor Christopher Oglesby's chilling depiction of White went from aggrieved and homophobic to truly mad over the course of the opera. Some choices made by the production team dull the work's effectiveness. The opera starts in New York City, where Milk grew up and lived for most of his life, and concludes in San Francisco, but the stage design — consisting of sets of stairs that are deployed in various formations and numerous hanging doors — lacks any sense of place. The projected photos of both cities don't quite do enough, leaving Castro Street feeling indistinguishable from Wall Street. The doors unsubtly symbolize the closet, where you'd find most LGBTQ people in the 1970s. The sets shift constantly around the stage and limit what director Brian Staufenbiel can do with his cast, particularly in the frequent crowd scenes. On top of all this, the costuming and styling of several characters seem slightly off, especially noticeable against the real-life photos and film the production uses. On Saturday, Nicole Paiement conducted with her customary sharpness and drive, though perhaps, in this case, less drive and more repose would have been to the opera's benefit.
San Francisco Chronicle
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
How ‘Harvey Milk Reimagined' honors the S.F. gay icon's legacy for a new era
It's fitting that 'Harvey Milk,' the opera by composer Stewart Wallace and librettist Michael Korie, should find a second life in San Francisco. Originally commissioned by David Gockley, former general director of Houston Grand Opera and later San Francisco Opera, it tells the story of the first openly gay elected official in California history, who served as a San Francisco supervisor for 11 months before he and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated in 1978. The definitive version of the opera premiered at San Francisco's Orpheum Theatre in 1996, with a reworked score and libretto following performances in Texas and New York the previous year. But at the end of that first gestation period, 'Harvey Milk' proved unwieldy, and the opera was seldom staged. To keep the work in the repertoire turned out to be a task that would take yet another revision and a different Bay Area opera company. Now, San Francisco's Opera Parallèle is presenting the West Coast premiere of 'Harvey Milk Reimagined' at the Blue Shield of California Theater at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for just four performances, starting Saturday, May 31 through June 7. Opera Parallèle has been involved in the project since 2017, when Gockley introduced Wallace to the company's creative team. The goal was to get a scaled-back version of the opera onstage in 2020, coinciding with the 90th anniversary of Milk's birth, but the timeline was delayed by COVID. For Creative Director Brian Staufenbiel and General and Artistic Director Nicole Paiement, the first step was a simpler structure. That meant paring down the opera from three acts to two and having far fewer characters. 'Nicole and Brian called me and said, 'Can you take a look at those small roles?'' Wallace told the Chronicle after a rehearsal at Oasis Arts in the South of Market District off Fourth Street. 'I think there were — I'm exaggerating — but it felt like thousands. 'I looked at the whole score, and I called them the next day and said, 'They're all gone.' They were, I think, shocked, but it had the effect of clearing the brush.' For his part, Staufenbiel wanted to streamline the production design for a smaller stage. He conceived a setup that can be reconfigured with projections as well as flying sculptures made out of doors that represent being in and out of the closet. 'The story takes you from the (Metropolitan) Opera to a park, a closet, the San Francisco Opera, City Hall and bedrooms,' Staufenbiel explained. 'We needed something that was very flexible.' Baritone Michael Kelly, who sings the title role, believes that staging this opera and remembering Milk as a civil rights icon is particularly poignant now, given the current political climate. 'He's the most important person, in my eyes, in terms of what we're all benefiting from,' Kelly said of the LGBTQ community. 'Also looking at the potential loss of those rights under (the current Trump) administration.' Kelly sees connections not just to the present moment but also to his own history. The baritone — like Milk, a gay Jewish man from Long Island, N.Y. — can draw on personal experience playing the role. 'This is something that I've done since I came out of the closet, exploring the history of our trajectory, our fight, our work,' he said. While in San Francisco for rehearsals, Kelly's been exploring the Castro, where Milk lived and owned a camera store. To better understand the character, he talked with activist Cleve Jones, who was mentored by Milk and worked in his City Hall office as an intern. Kelly recalled some of the questions he had about Milk: 'Was he kind? Was he bitchy? Was he gracious?' 'He had a lot of insight into that and said, 'There's no easy way to talk about Harvey without saying the extraordinary person he was in supporting his friends,'' Kelly said of those conversations. Jones' friendship with Milk deepened during the last year of the supervisor's life, which saw the successful defeat of the Briggs Initiative, a state proposition to ban lesbians and gay men from teaching in public schools. 'One of the things that struck me early on in my acquaintance with Harvey was just how many incarnations the guy went through before he found who he was supposed to be,' Jones told the Chronicle, highlighting how the popular image of Milk as a larger-than-life figure fails to fully capture the challenges and setbacks he endured. 'It wasn't really until he started running for office that, I think, it all started to come together inside his head. Then when he won, it was as if suddenly he had found the costume that fit.' Wallace considered a similar question when working on the opera — namely, how Milk transformed from a Barry Goldwater Republican and closeted stockbroker into a civil rights leader and gay icon. The composer found the answer in the life of his own father, who was of the same generation as Milk and was deeply affected by the mass slaughter of Jews during World War II. Wallace believes that it was those feelings that led Milk to fight for gay rights too. In the opera, 'we imagine that his consciousness and advocacy and vocal outspokenness about being a Jew post-Holocaust in the United States informed his growing consciousness as a gay man,' Wallace said. 'There's an aria in the first act where he sings, 'My star is a pair of triangles. One pink. One yellow. They overlap, as I do.' That was really the founding idea of the opera.' Wallace wants more people to know this story, which led him to rewrite the opera, making it accessible for smaller companies to stage. 'I started from the blank page and went through the whole thing,' he said. 'The plan is to see if we can inject 'Harvey Milk' into the operatic repertoire.' 'There's no doubt Harvey would have enjoyed this,' he said.
