Center City Opera Theater's "ConNEXTions'

Three operas in search of a future

JIM RUTTER

At least one established Philadelphia company took advantage of the Fringe Festival to try out new work on the cheap: Center City Opera Theatre embarked on "ConNEXTions," a program designed to showcase opera’s next generation. From an initial stack of more than 100 submissions, artistic director Andrew Kurtz selected three pieces that would fit his goals of presenting “new work, new artists,” while building “new audiences.” I can’t speak for the 97 short operas he rejected, but on the basis of "ConNEXTions," I’d say contemporary opera faces a tough sledding ahead.

To be sure, The Golden Gate proved that there’s at least one good composer out there. Conrad Cummings, taking his story from Vikram Seth’s novel of the same same-title, tells a tale of love and loss in 1980s San Francisco, where five 20-somethings fall in and out of each other’s relationships— something like St. Elmo’s Fire, but with gay characters and far more tolerance.

A bit of Love Story thrown in

Though it’s currently only scored for piano, Cummings’s piece achieves a high degree of complexity in the melodic structure, offering plenty of modulating passages between the emotional outbursts of song, including a seamless transition into four-part singing. At times it’s sufficiently subdued to feel more easy listening than opera, but at others it demonstrates a powerful intensity in a pair of solo numbers for John (Jason Switzer), who agonizes over his ex-girlfriend’s marriage.

Like many composers who use folk music to enhance the audience’s ability to identify with the stories and characters (think of Offenbach in Orpheus in the Underworld), Cummings interpolates appropriate snippets from Love Story’s theme (“Where Do I Begin?”) and Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”—in both cases, tied into the story for humorous effect.

I loved Cummings’s music and would like to hear his completed score, but he really should’ve hired a librettist. His characters sing their stage directions— for example, “makes a feeble joke and walks out”— rather than actually performing them (though in some cases, a character will answer a phone while singing, “She answers the phone”). It’s like having a novel read aloud rather than hearing singers perform their lines. Rather than reveal character or develop plot and motive through conversation or monologue, Cummings’s cast sings almost entirely about themselves in the third person— and mostly about their own mental states.

Cummings also uses far too much of a novelist’s vocabulary. Who sings the line “She loved you ‘undenudedly’ ”? I haven’t read Seth’s novel, but an adaptation needs to fit the genre, not merely transpose the text over to music. Next time, Cummings should hire a poet or playwright to do this work for him.

Starvation as art

"ConNEXTions" continued with two one-act operas, Stefan Weisman’s Fade (libretto by David Cote), and The Hunger Art by Jeff Myers, with libretto by Royce Vavrek. While they differed musically, the concept-heavy librettos of both failed to achieve their creators’ grand ambitions.

Vavrek’s story in The Hunger Art, at least, failed spectacularly. Drawing on two sources— Kafka’s short story “The Hunger Artist” and the Biblical tale of Adam and Eve— Myers’s opera opens on husband and wife Alfons (Neil Darling) and Ivona (Kirsten Chambers) locked in a cage on the 38th day of a 40-day hunger-based performance piece. Since “No one trusts a hunger artist,” the venue has hired three butchers to watch them and make sure they don’t sneak a bite or two on the sly.

Vavrek offers a wonderful fusion of themes of the two story lines. Alfons distrusts his wife; she had “enough devotion to sit outside his cage” and watch the act for 40 days, but he doubts her fortitude to actually carry the artistic journey through to the end. And she’s clearly not up to it, at one point trading on her appetites to convince her husband to have sex with her when the butchers fall asleep.

Restless, she tries to crawl outside, when one of the butchers (Switzer as Bronislav) offers her an apple. She yields to the temptation and, as a result, Alfons banishes her— not from paradise, but from the cage in which he performs his art. Conceptually, it’s a brilliant stroke, but Vavrek’s lyrics convey it poorly.

Musically, Myers’s dark and haunting tones build and sustain the tension throughout. But when the story offers Vavrek a chance to write a long meditative song on the beauty of art and why the artist performs, he offers an answer that’s both maudlin and tepid: “We do it for them.” The remainder of the piece similarly failed to explore his bold concept either psychologically or aesthetically.

An eco-friendly opera

But at least The Hunger Art provided some form of sustenance. The characters in Fade, on the other hand, only want to apologize for a life of excess.

Gertrude (Veronica Chapman-Smith) and Albert (Switzer) just built a new mansion, and they’ve hired a live-in housekeeper (Leandra Ramm) to clean up after them. Tucked away in the mountains, Albert complains about his lack of cell phone reception. The housekeeper, meanwhile, dodges his advances while singing a song about unpacking boxes.

The main conflict: Gertrude complains that they haven’t built a 100% green (eco-friendly) house, and Albert replies (in song), “No, it’s not totally solar, yes; we’re still on the power grid.” (I’m not kidding— that’s an actual lyric that Switzer sings without a trace of irony.) Al Gore’s monotone in An Inconvenient Truth was more compelling.

Weisman’s music offers little help. It’s initially chaotic, jumbled and highly inappropriate texturally for the entire scene. By the time the score begins to establish melodic (if highly repetitive) lines, librettist Cote makes little use of them. He’s too busy stuffing every possible contrast into his script, as the couple and their maid discuss issues of wealth and poverty, consumerism vs. environmentalism, and the value of individual effort contrasted with social forces.

Rather than resolve or even explore any of these contradictions, Cote seems to have been concerned only with tucking in every neurotic conflict of modernity. I found myself wondering how a couple with such divergent views ever got together in the first place.

Good voices deserve better vehicles

To be sure, anyone searching for good singing would have found it in "ConNEXTions." Switzer gave excellent performances in all three pieces, combining a powerfully dramatic stage presence with a sumptuous baritone and excellent articulation even in his lower register. Chambers and Eve Gigliotti (who appeared in The Golden Gate) both displayed lovely color, especially Gigliotti’s luscious mezzo.

I delighted in hearing these singers in such an intimate setting as the Ethical Society’s main hall. Maybe next year Kurtz will find them better material to perform.