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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.
Axios
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
At the Houston Grand Opera, two spring shows wrestle with love, faith and fate
Both of the spring shows at the Houston Grand Opera lean into the season's "truly, madly, deeply" theme — with heavy doses of religion — but they are distinctly different in story, tone and experience. State of the opera:" Breaking the Waves" is a contemporary opera that premiered in 2016, composed by Missy Mazzoli. It's sung in English and is unsettling and strange, but you will get hooked with the plot line. "Breaking the Waves" is about a devout young woman in a conservative religious community who believes sacrificing herself — emotionally and sexually — is the only way to save her paralyzed husband. The intrigue:"Breaking the Waves" was supposed to make its HGO debut in the 2020-2021 season, but it was delayed by the pandemic. The piece is sexually explicit in a way you don't expect on the opera stage — it has profanity, nudity and graphic scenes. Mazzoli wasn't sure she'd ever compose the piece. When her librettist suggested adapting Lars von Trier's 1996 film, she was hesitant — but she said "the idea wouldn't leave me alone." What they're saying: Mazzoli is part of a small group of composers bringing opera into the 21st century. She tells Axios, "I love being part of the operatic tradition … I'm not out here to destroy the tradition and burn it all down and build it again." "I see this film and this story as the story of a woman in an impossible situation where everyone is telling her what to do, and she's left only with her own agency and her own idea of what is moral and what is good," Mazzoli says. My experience:"Breaking the Waves" was a haunting, twisted story. I still don't know exactly how I feel about the plot, but I know the production and its ethical questions will stay with me. The opera is no doubt a talker for its hard-to-shake themes. I was also struck by the multipurpose set design and the dramatic, nautical-influenced score. Meanwhile, Richard Wagner's " Tannhäuser" is a traditional opera. It follows a knight torn between sacred love and earthly desire, wrestling with redemption and damnation. It's big. It's slow. It's full of Wagner's famous dramatic and soaring music. The production is grand, with beautiful, ornate set design. Wagner's music in "Tannhäuser" is as rich and sweeping as always but he continues to test my attention span with a four-hour opera. As beautiful as his productions are, I'm starting to realize the stories just might not be for me — at least now. That said, I'm probably in the minority, as plenty of people around me were excitedly analyzing the symbolism. If you go: "Breaking the Waves" runs through May 4, and "Tannhäuser" is on through May 11.
New York Times
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
At Houston Grand Opera, ‘This Is a Good Time'
On a recent morning at the Wortham Theater Center, home of Houston Grand Opera, the orchestra was playing through the intense score of Missy Mazzoli's 2016 opera 'Breaking the Waves.' Led by the conductor Patrick Summers, the players fine-tuned eerie glissando slides and dug into Mazzoli's creaking, scratching effects. At the same time, a few floors down, the young bass Alexandros Stavrakakis was at a coaching session, trying to find depths in the often dry Landgraf in Wagner's 'Tannhaüser.' Stavrakakis was singing his role for the first time, like the rest of the 'Tannhaüser' cast — a bold move for a Wagner opera at a major company. It was a reminder of another moment when old and new came together in Houston. In 1987, the Wortham opened with a pairing that was also a kind of manifesto: Verdi's 'Aida' and the world premiere of John Adams's 'Nixon in China,' a statement that opera's past and present could surge toward the future in Texas. At that point, it had been just over 30 years since Houston Grand Opera's scrappy beginnings, but it already had a reputation for being the rare American company fully invested in fostering new American work. It has been an early adopter of populist innovations like above-the-stage translations and outdoor simulcasts. It has shown resilience, too: Displaced for a season when the Wortham was flooded by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the company moved to a convention center and didn't miss a performance. Now, at 70, it continues to be a model for the field. With many opera companies in a doom loop of shrinkage caused by rising costs and stagnant (or worse) earnings, Houston has proved an exception. Driven by creative leadership and generous donors, its programming budget has risen steadily. By this summer, its endowment will have increased to nearly $120 million — almost double what it was five years ago. 'I'm trying to push the boundaries of self-esteem for H.G.O.,' said Khori Dastoor, 44, the company's chief executive since 2021. 'It starts with deciding and feeling that we can be leaders, instead of always comparing ourselves with bigger markets and larger institutions.' Even a success story in opera is one of struggles: for audiences, for fresh repertory, for relevance. The larger of the Wortham's two theaters has a capacity of about 2,400, significantly fewer seats than some major American houses, yet a standard like 'La Bohème' was only 70 percent sold this winter. Still, the company's ticket sales are stronger than just before the pandemic. Labor relations are calm. A robust reserve fund created after Harvey has provided a cushion for experimentation. Over a few days of rehearsals and interviews recently, the high quality of the work was clear. The orchestra has an easy rapport with Summers, the music director since the late 1990s. The chorus rehearses nights and weekends, with a group that includes teachers, doctors and lawyers as well as professional singers — but, led by Richard Bado, who has been with the company since 1984, it made a nuanced, mighty sound at the close of 'Tannhaüser.' More unusual, everyone attested to a palpable sense of stability and warmth, in a field better known for deficit cycles and fraught relations among employees and management. 'A lot of the time you don't really recognize the good times when they're happening,' said Dennis Whittaker, a bassist in the orchestra for almost 30 years. 'But this is a good time.' As Houston grows, its larger peers are on ever more tenuous footing. The Metropolitan Opera, still the country's titan, has been forced to raid its endowment and trim its performance schedule. Lyric Opera of Chicago and San Francisco Opera's seasons have been slashed to roughly 40 main stage performances of six titles, around the same volume Houston has maintained for years. But because of legacy labor contracts and other overhead costs, Chicago's annual budget is over $70 million and San Francisco's nearly $90 million, figures that are perilously difficult to cover as productivity declines. Houston spends just $33 million for a similar output. Without consistent sellouts, Dastoor is not looking to add more main stage productions any time soon, but she is insistent that the company does need to get bigger. 'Maintenance of the current audience will lead to failure,' she said. 'The only viable path to sustainability is growth.' After World War II, the city's appetite for opera was whetted by touring visits from the Met, and Walter Herbert, a German conductor who had fled the Nazis, saw an opening. Houston Grand Opera was inaugurated with Strauss's 'Salome' — then still a daring choice that showed the venturesome spirit at the company's core. Finances were touch and go in those early years, but star singers like Jon Vickers and Beverly Sills began to appear, and in 1972 David Gockley, just 28, succeeded Herbert as general director, remaining in the position until 2005. Gockley had vision and charisma at the right moment, with Houston's wealth exploding as the oil industry boomed. In 1974, the company produced Thomas Pasatieri's 'The Seagull,' its first commissioned work of dozens to date. Over the next few years it gave the first fully professional performances of Scott Joplin's 'Treemonisha' and a landmark version of Gershwin's 'Porgy and Bess,' with both productions transferring to Broadway. The company formed a close relationship with the composer Carlisle Floyd, who helped found its young artist program. Gockley brought in some audacious interpretations of the classics, as well as musical theater that made sense alongside Verdi; in 1984, Houston was the first opera house to present Sondheim's 'Sweeney Todd.' Few other big companies would have had the patience and flexibility to germinate Meredith Monk's unconventional 'Atlas.' The opening of the Wortham brought gleaming facilities, including an 1,100-seat second theater for more intimate pieces. When the Houston Symphony, which had collaborated with the opera since its founding, wanted to move on, Summers was hired to build a house orchestra. After shaping an ensemble up for the challenge of scores like Wagner's 'Ring' and Mieczyslaw Weinberg's 'The Passenger,' which toured to New York in 2014, Summers will step down as artistic and music director after next season. 'I admire Khori immensely,' he said, 'and I wanted to stay long enough into her tenure to give her continuity. Now it feels like a natural stopping point.' Finding his replacement is a priority for Dastoor, who trained as a soprano and attended 'Tannhaüser' rehearsal with an open score in her lap, tapping out the piano part on the pages with her fingers. She came to Houston from Opera San José in California, which she led after a period working for the Packard Humanities Institute, a large family foundation that gave her insight into the mind-set of wealthy donors. She has already shown skill at fund-raising: In 2023, a $22 million gift from Sarah and Ernest Butler was the largest in the company's history. But the city's donor base has long been said to be unusually committed. 'It's a very Houston thing: 'It has to be the best, and if it is, I will support you,'' Bado said. 'So the support has not waned.' Claire Liu, the chair of the company's board, said: 'Houston started as a really entrepreneurial environment, full of handshake deals. So people trust each other; people help each other. You have an incredibly philanthropic community. They want the city to be successful.' Where will all that growth go, if not into main stage offerings? Marc Scorca, the chief executive of Opera America, a trade group, said that Houston, like its peers, needs 'to show artistic and civic value outside the walls of the opera house, the opera bubble.' Under Gockley's successor, Anthony Freud, the company invested in works that emerged from the community, like a mariachi opera and an oratorio based on interviews with immigrants in the Houston area. Dastoor successfully tried out a Family Day performance this fall, and recently brought child-friendly work to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, which attracts huge crowds. Forays like this outside the Wortham, already a focus of the company's education and community partnerships, are expected to be an ever greater part of operations. 'If we're going to 70, 80, 100 venues every season,' Dastoor said, 'doing hundreds of events, that all informs the main stage. It isn't on the side.' Dastoor doesn't rest on the company's laurels or dismiss the obstacles it faces. 'We don't want to play to half-empty houses,' she said. 'We want to find a sweet spot, to grow with the community and see what they respond to.' The result, as everywhere in opera, is a mixture of chestnuts and riskier fare. Next season leans on 'Porgy and Bess,' an audience favorite that will get nine performances, and runs of the stalwarts 'Hansel and Gretel' and 'The Barber of Seville.' But there will also be Robert Wilson's enigmatic staging of Handel's 'Messiah,' the company's first production of Puccini's 'Il Trittico' and a revised version of Kevin Puts's 'Silent Night' that will travel to the Met. The young artist program, the Butler Studio, will put on Carlisle Floyd's masterpiece, 'Of Mice and Men,' in the Wortham's smaller space; using that smaller theater more often is an aim for the coming years. A major fund-raising campaign is in its early stages, of a size that Dastoor hopes will ensure the company's freedom from year-after-year anxieties, once and for all. 'We could get off this hamster wheel,' she said. 'My legacy, I hope, will be building an audience for opera in a modern American city.'
Axios
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
What to know about the 2025-2026 theater season
Theaters are pulling back the curtain on their upcoming season — and the calendar is packed with drama, mayhem and laughter. Why it matters: The 2025-2026 lineup announcements help theaters lock in subscribers and boost revenue ahead of the fall, while giving audiences a glimpse of what's to come. The big picture: Houston is home to one of the country's most active theater communities, with a mix of major institutions and smaller companies that stage work year-round. Here's a snapshot of what the theater scene next season will look like: Broadway at the Hobby Center This season brings a mix of Houston premieres, high-energy newcomers and returning fan favorites. The lineup opens with the first national tour of the Tony Award–winning "Kimberly Akimbo," followed by new-to-Houston productions like "Water for Elephants" and "The Great Gatsby." Fan favorites such as "Hadestown" and "Six" return. Eight-show package subscriptions begin at $359. Houston Grand Opera HGO's theme this season is meant to "honor the light we hold for our art form, and the great composers and storytellers through the centuries — but for all the artists and creatives who bring light into our world," says CEO Khori Dastoor. The company revisits "Porgy and Bess," which helped launch HGO as a trailblazer and went on to earn a Tony and a Grammy. The season also includes the company's first-ever production of Puccini's "Il trittico" and a revised version of the Pulitzer Prize–winning "Silent Night" by Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell. Full subscriptions start at $100. Theater Under the Stars Next season at TUTS leans into stories rooted in the past. "Million Dollar Quartet" recreates a 1956 recording session that brought together Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and other rock legends. "Back to the Future: The Musical" brings the beloved '80s film to the stage. The season kicks off with "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee," set at a fictional middle school spelling competition. Subscription packages will be available April 21. Houston Ballet A mix of beloved classics and contemporary works awaits this season, with world premieres, audience favorites, and celebrated guest choreographers in the spotlight — from the haunting romance of "Giselle" to a vivid tribute to Frida Kahlo in "Broken Wings." Season packages start at around $135. The Alley Theatre The Alley's upcoming season blends world premieres with inventive takes on well-known stories. Highlights include "English," the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner about five students grappling with identity and language in an English class; a stage adaptation of "The Da Vinci Code"; and "The Body Snatcher," a spine-tingling love story arriving just in time for spooky season. Three-play subscription packages start at $195.
Chicago Tribune
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘Seven Veils' review: The operatics are everywhere in this backstage melodrama
Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan scored a fair-sized sensation with his 1996 Canadian Opera Company production of the Richard Strauss opera 'Salome' — the one about the stepdaughter of the depraved King Herod, her Dance of the Seven Veils, Salome's lust for John the Baptist and the circumstances forcing Salome to settle for a kiss on the lips of her beloved's beheaded head instead. Psychosexually forward, Egoyan's staging went on to Houston Grand Opera and Vancouver Opera, which co-produced the 'Salome' production with the Canadian company. Egoyan then revisited 'Salome' in 2023. But he had more thoughts about the material he wanted to realize for a new medium. Re-using the physical production, dominated by Derek McLane's strikingly angular scenic design, Egoyan had an idea for a movie about a director, new to opera, restaging her late mentor and semi-secret lover's triumph while a big pot of backstage operatics simmers away. 'Seven Veils,' starring Amanda Seyfried, is the result. The themes are deadly serious: In the fictional narrative cooked up by Egoyan, staging this 'Salome' finds Seyfried's fraught character confronting the memory of her abuser-father and her childhood sexual trauma while exploring how life can illuminate and amplify art. At the same time, Egoyan's impulses lean toward a kind of wry melodrama, and a slew of narrative developments and hidden agendas. From what we see of the Egoyan stage production of 'Salome' in 'Seven Veils,' it looks like a winner; the movie, unfortunately, is a mixed bag, though still fairly absorbing. 'Small but meaningful': That's how Jeanine, Seyfried's character, describes the tweaks she has in mind for the 'Salome' restaging she has been hired to direct. Her late mentor, who encouraged Jeanine's ideas while exploiting her sexually, represents a legendary figure, especially to his widow (Lanette Ware), now the opera company's general manager. She's likely aware of the affair her husband had with Jeanine. Meantime, there are present-day affairs underway in this busy operatic troupe, and also a considerable number of underminers. At one point, Jeanine sits for an interview with a podcaster and it takes roughly eight seconds of screen time for him to establish his bona fides as a world-class weasel. Jeanine also is dealing with an uncertain marriage (they're in a tentative open-it-up phase) and a mother living with Alzheimer's, whose caregiver is involved with Jeanine's semi-quasi-separated husband. It's a lot. Seyfried, who has worked with writer-director Egoyan before on the super-ripe erotic drama 'Chloe' (2009), finesses some zig-zaggy tonal swerves confidently and well. The writing, however, wobbles. And in that regard the screenplay's inventions are wholly unlike Egoyan's own staging of 'Salome,' as judged by what we see of it in the cinematic riff 'Seven Veils.' Running time: 1:47
