Review: NEW WORKS COLLECTIVE - 2024 at Opera Theatre Of Saint Louis

The Opera Theatre of Saint Louis has presented three brand-new short operas—this year’s harvest from its  “New Works Collective” project.  And the evening is a wonder!  I’ve never seen an evening of opera that so toweringly rose above my expectations.  The music was beautiful and varied, the stories moving, and the voices marvelous.  (And the champaign-and-munchies gathering in the lobby afterwards had the most joyously, gleefully, honestly celebratory vibe I can remember.)

The New Works Collective is a three-year project wherein OTSL commits to producing three newly commissioned operas each year.  But it delegates a very major decision to a community committee:  specifically, the decision on which operas to commission.  And it’s a committee not of opera professionals, but of St. Louis “artists, advocates, and local leaders”.

Risky gamble!

This year’s three new operas were:

• “Unbroken” (composer Ronald Maurice, librettist J. Mae Barizo)
• “Mechanisms” (composer J. E. Hernández, librettist Mariana Mott Newirth)
• “On My Mind” (composer Jasmine Barnes, librettist Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton)

Now when folks submit their operatic ideas to this competition they are promised that the winning operas will be developed and produced—“with minimal production elements in a black-box theater”.  But here, on the stage of the attractive new Kirkwood Performing Arts Center, we are treated to quite a lavish production!  What looks at first like a stylized city sky-line becomes all things to all people!  In the hands of scenic designer Kim Powers and video designer David Murakami, with able assists from lighting designer John Alexander, the set becomes a church (outside and inside), a comfortable home at Thanksgiving dinner, a hospital, a living room, a school, a Dallas town-house, a Houston home, a hotel ballroom in mid-convention, and the vividly colored swirling sensory world of a child who is “wired differently”.  All these transitions are swift and fluid and beautiful.  I have never been a big fan of electronic scenery, but this work, using scores of LED video panels, has made me a believer.  Our entry into the child’s synesthetic world would have been quite impossible without that video support.

During development of the three operas OTSL asked each creative team to choose one single word to describe their opus. 

• For “Unbroken” that word was “resilience”.   The opera’s title—and theme, really—are from that treasured old hymn, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”.   We meet a strong family—Mama and her three sons (one adult, one teen, one child), Aunt Mary, and Uncle John.  Mama knows she is dying. 
  
  Composer Maurice and librettist Barizo give us a story so gentle, so beautiful, so filled with a rich, detailed love!  We become part of that family.  It’s very like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in its graceful, poetic presentation of how we humans deal with time, and loss, and the passing of wisdom and fortitude from generation to generation.  We see the family singing with their church, sharing a very Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving dinner (with a gorgeous a cappella table grace), fearing but accepting their impending loss.  Mama’s wise spirit will live in their hearts.
  
  Mr. Maurice grew up in St. Louis, and the story is based on his own family.  But he and Ms. Barizo make it a beautifully universal story.
  
  The music is sweet, melodic, with touches of gospel.
  
  As the old hymn says:

“You can picture happy gath’rings
Round the fireside long ago,
And you think of tearful partings,
When they left you here below.”

Will the circle be unbroken by and by?   Yes, indeed!  This family circle will be forever unbroken.

• “Mechanisms” deals with a neurodivergent fifth-grade girl, Aurora (“Roe”).
  The one descriptive word for this opera is “acceptance”.
  
  Young Roe has great difficulty with math in school.  She just can’t learn the normal ways of working with numbers.  But she knows that “5” is BLUE, and when Dad asks her “What’s 6 x 57?” she replies, “Green yellow purple blue, feels like feathers . . . three hundred forty-two.”  Her teacher hasn’t the time or flexibility to deal with her.  Mom is worried and scolds her to try harder.  Dad—perhaps a bit “spectrumy” himself—is more understanding.
  
  The stage shows their home and the school.  A wildly imaginative video plot, with black-and-white backgrounds startlingly splashed in vivid reeling color, swirls of glowing numbers, and some very striking modern music—these all let us peek into Roe’s sensory world.  I was reminded of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time—a 2012 play which also successfully portrayed such a child and such a world.
  
  Roe’s schoolmates are comfortable in math, they tease her (and they are all threateningly much larger than she). In the end, though, led by her father, we all come to accept her and her way of seeing things—and her “mechanisms” for dealing with them.  In the end she is surrounded by a warm circle of love.
  
  There’s personal investment here also:  librettist Newirth herself had a learning disability.

  
• “On My Mind” is an opera about “Friendship”.  The title probably refers to the intense and lively popular song.
  
  There’s lots of light good humor here.  The music is fresh, modern, sometimes jazzy and playful, with a prominent presence of piano.
  
  We meet Melodee and Lyric, two young black women—one a composer, one a librettist.  They don’t know each other yet.  They live, respectively, in Dallas and in Houston.  One is caring for a grandmother;  one is married with kids.  We see the two hurriedly packing, rushing to catch a plane to a Music Makers Conference in some big hotel. 
  
  The conference leader (a crass emcee type) urges them on:  “The bar is open.  Let networking begin!”  It’s a mostly White crowd.  The usual faux pas occur: a gent mistakes Lyric for a waitress; another, on learning that Melodee is composing operas, says, “Oh, like Porgy and Bess?”  The ladies are not offended, really.  They’re just tired of this.  They just wish they could be some place where the name-tags on their lanyards didn’t simply say “BLACK WOMAN”.  Oh, to be able to just talk to somebody as a person, not as a Representative!
  
  Then, at the bar, “across a crowded room” as it were, they meet!  And the rest is history:  Bee Eff Eff!  There is (refreshingly) not a hint of erotic attraction. 
  
  Can one, after a certain age, make a new best friend?  Oh, indeed!
  
  Towards the end they sing a duet as lovely as the “Flower Duet” in Lakme.
  
  Ms. Barnes and Ms. Mouton are, of course, at the heart of this story.  They are themselves late-met Best Friends Forever.

There were eight brilliant singers on stage, most of them singing a role in each of the three operas.  Noting only a few highlights:

• MeroŃ‘ Khalia Adeeb brings a clear, sweet soprano to the role of Mama in “Unbroken”, then she seems to shed decades to brighten the young lively role of Melodee in “On My Mind”.
• Baritone John Godhard Mburu is wonderfully rich and powerful as the eldest son in “Unbroken” and conveys such earnest love for his mother.
• The petite Helen Zhibing Huang sings the synesthetic Roe.  She brings a child’s vulnerability and an astonishing coloratura soprano to the role.
• Mezzo-soprano Kristy Swann brings lovely warm heart to the roles of Aunt Susan in “Unbroken” and Lyric in “On My Mind”.
• Maria Consamus, Aaron Crouch, Aaren Rivard, and Jesus Vicent Murillo add their splendid voices to the wonderful mix.

Conductor Darwin Aquino draws perfection from his small (eleven-piece) orchestra.   Magically they sound much larger.

Stage Director Kimille Howard merits huge praise for the beautiful, deft, detailed staging of these pieces. 

Costumer Mike Eubanks clothes his cast perfectly—from Roe’s pink play overalls to Melodee’s stylish salmon pants suit. 

So, why were my expectations for this evening so low?  Well, with major artistic decisions being made by a committee—a committee including several who claim, in their bios, a profession of “activist”—I was expecting just another evening of social scolding.  But what a delight!  Free from politics, free from angry conflict, inviting us into the very real lives of real people, and with such a wealth of beautiful and beautifully varied music—from the comfort of tradition to the quite avant-garde—this was a dream of an evening of opera.

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