Opera Philadelphia presents Michael R. Jackson’s Complications in Sue

The work was packed with international talent, and everything about this pastiche production was unusual. Many operas begin when a composer finds a story, snags the rights, and then identifies a librettist. Here, Michael R. Jackson’s remarkable, poetic libretto came first: spare, sometimes comic, sometimes searing, always singable. In 10 movements, it tracks the life of mysterious protagonist Sue, embodied with style and undeniable substance by cabaret icon and MacArthur Fellow Justin Vivian Bond.

A Sue is born

Bond had worked with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and shared her idea about playing a woman named Sue, while Jackson, the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright (and opera lover), had spoken separately about writing opera text. When Costanzo became Opera Philadelphia’s general director in 2024, he realized this match-up would be an apt way to celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary.

But lacking the four years (minimum) it takes to craft an opus, Costanzo devised a seemingly risky, maybe impossible, ultimately successful solution. Recalling a parlor game played by Surrealist artists, he divided the opera into its 10 components—one for each decade of Sue’s life—and approached 10 established composers, asking each to set one act of Jackson’s libretto with eight minutes of music. “Who could say no to that?” he thought, and all said yes.

The starry fleet of commissioned composers—Andy Akiho, Alistair Coleman, Nathalie Joachim, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly, Rene Orth, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Kamala Sankaram, Dan Schlosberg, and Errollyn Wallen—work in multiple musical realms. Some had written opera; some not. Each was given only a plot outline and their individual segment. It could have been a muddled mess. But threaded like pearls on Jackson’s excellent libretto, these 10 musical vignettes became an integrated and moving whole.

Ten composers, four singers

Wallen’s music opens the work in a hospital nursery, where Death (mezzo Rehanna Thelwell) and her black-robed trio of cohorts (soprano Kiera Duffy, tenor Nicky Spence, and bass-baritone Nicholas Newton) greet newborn Sue. They tell her she will meet them again at the opera’s end, an apt dramatic device introducing both the storyline and the four fabulous singers who populate Sue’s life. Each composer crafted demanding, aria-like virtuosic sections for the four singers, who played multiple characters ranging from comic to epic, compellingly sung and vividly acted.

In Mazzoli’s Scene 2, 10-year-old Sue eagerly anticipates the Santa whom her parents told her doesn’t exist, as he bemoans his taxing job. In Scene 3 (music by Akiho), seemingly diffident collegian Sue is avidly watched and socially dissected by co-eds who both “hate her and want to be her”. Then Joachim’s music moves us inside Sue’s imagination and on to her former marriage to beau Roger (music by Schlossberg). The clever Scene 6 features an Algorithmic Trio (set by Salvant) that catalogues Sue’s online preferences, after which we see her first in her condo (music by Coleman) and then as her child-self watches 70-year-old Sue (music by Sankaram). In the penultimate section (by Orth), two nursing-home octogenarians try to outrun Death, and in the finale we’ve been expecting, Muhly’s music and the Death Quartet take Sue home.

Sue’s debut

Throughout, Bond is the titular star of the show. In the birth segment, Sue enters down the audience left aisle, resplendent in white tulle and feathers, referencing (sartorially and in performance) the seemingly antithetical worlds of both the cabaret stage and the nursery. Throughout, she is both the action’s protagonist and its object. Active and acted upon, Bond’s savvy (mainly silent) performance is incisive even when static, communicating with the lift of a shoulder or the turn of her head.

Sue does speak several times, and once Bond sang, a courageous cabaret performer among opera virtuosos. She also delivered a pointed, feisty improvisation, an overtly anti-establishment name-calling monologue, declaiming and condemning in equal measure. It was true to her cabaret persona, but though her fans in the audience roared with glee at each biting barb, the segment interrupted and slowed down the evening’s musical and dramatic through-line.

Starry collaborations

In her Opera Philadelphia debut, conductor Caren Levine (on the Metropolitan Opera’s musical team) and her orchestra had a daunting task: virtuosic sets for instrumentalists (as for singers) in 10 compositional styles. But there was never a misstep or a moment of musical hesitation; Levine and her players were in top form throughout.

This unusual collaboration featured another starry team: stage directors Zach Winokur (no stranger to Opera Philadelphia) and Raja Feather Kelly (in a company debut). Both began their careers as dancers, so their collaborative stagecraft was lively, inventive, and seamless. There were a few slow points (several slightly too-long scenes), and occasionally the staging descended into an overriding freneticism, as when the condo scene’s broad comedy undercut the libretto’s message and the music’s beauty.

But considering the opera’s unusual genesis and multiple collaborative processes, missteps were remarkably few. The birth and death sections were especially effective, and in staging the penultimate scene—Thelwell and Newton as octogenarians trying step-by-halting-step to outrun Death—the directors wisely (and movingly) cleared their usually busy stage and gave the duo total focus.

A who’s who of design and music

Scenic designer Krit Robinson created a versatile, modern-feeling playing space, a canvas for Yuki Link’s mood-setting lights. A septet of hardworking supernumeraries served as nonspeaking characters and handled multiple scene changes with efficiency and aplomb. Costumes by Victoria Bek were always on target, considering the myriad wardrobe changes, and Bond’s costumes featured luscious creations (with maybe more on that upstage rack?) by Jonathan Anderson, the creative force behind the houses of Dior and JW Anderson.

Complications in Sue also featured an impressive sound design (Chris Sannino) that integrated Bond’s miking with the balance demands of orchestra and singers. And he skillfully handled a difficult challenge: mezzo Thelwell was vocally unable to sing on opening night, but due to the complex staging, she acted her roles (beautifully). Her excellent cover, Imara Miles, sang from an audience left box in a workaround that was seamless, beautifully executed, and perfectly calibrated.

Company historian Lilly Kass gave her usual helpful pre-show talk, and the very complete program book had excellent notes (Shannon Eblen), with extended bios of the librettist and all 10 composers that read like a who’s who in 21st-century music.

Movements and complications

Jackson’s chronological libretto, with intimations of both mortality and immortality, was made visual by Robinson’s gigantic pendulum hanging stage left and cantilevered over the audience. In horology, a timepiece that indicates simply hours, minutes, and seconds is called a movement; features beyond those are called complications.

Jackson’s skillful libretto is this work’s movement, the hours and minutes of his protagonist’s life, and those 10 gifted composers are the opera’s complications. But timepieces with a plethora of extra features are referred to as grandes complications, and as Opera Philadelphia works to expand the genre, Complications in Sue, with its innovative concept, inventive staging, bountiful music, and stellar design, was a grande complication indeed.