One hundred or more years ago, when audiences saw a Puccini opera, it might have been a premiere. The Puccini and Verdi works we’re so accustomed to seeing in opera houses today once were new works, and they often generated a lot of controversy. That opportunity has been presented to Virginia Opera audiences of late as the company sets a new course designed to mix recent and new American works with Puccini and Verdi favorites.
Andre Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” first presented in 1998 and based on the popular Tennessee Williams play, opens Saturday, Feb. 16, in the Harrison Opera House in Norfolk.
“Any institution that wants to be artistically vibrant needs to expand,” says Robin Thompson, Virginia Opera’s artistic adviser.
“We need to bring new operatic experiences to the audience with the idea to expand their artistic horizons and their desire to see more,” Thompson said. “The same-old, same-old does not promote growth — that is a dead-end street.”
Thompson began this transformation last season with “Orphee” which was generally well-received by the public and the company’s board. Thompson admits he was nervous about presenting the Philip Glass opera.
“I didn’t know how Virginia would react to it,” he says. ‘But on opening night, people were standing up and cheering.”
That production was directed by Sam Helfrich, who is also the director for “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Thompson calls Helfrich a sought-after director and has booked him to direct three productions.
While many contemporary operas get a premiere and are never heard from again, “Streetcar” already has received multiple performances in American and European opera houses since it was first presented by the San Francisco Opera.
Part of its appeal is the popular Tennessee Williams play.
Helfrich says the libretto written by Previn’s collaborator, Philip Littell, uses Williams’ language directly.
“It’s very accessible, maybe more than the play, because it’s streamlined,” says Helfrich. “The opera really is the play with a few judicious cuts.”
Add to that Previn’s palpable score, which conductor Ari Pelto calls an amalgam of recitative, or spoken singing, and orchestral passages that underscore the tense relationships between the three principal characters and the seedy, steamy setting of New Orleans that Williams envisioned.
“A Streetcar Named Desire” found a national audience with the 1951 film starring Marlon Brando and Vivian Leigh.
Brando played Stanley Kowalski, a brutish laborer married to Stella. Trouble erupts when Blanche DuBois, Stella’s sister, comes to stay. Stanley has a habit of mistreating Stella, and Blanche tries to get her sister to leave her husband. The play reaches a climax when Stanley rapes Stella and she goes mad and must be sent to a mental hospital.
“Stanley’s character is very sexual but he’s not aware of it,” says Helfrich. “He does beat his wife but he’s a character who doesn’t think about his actions. His eruptions are very primal…He’s portrayed as an animal.”
In this production, Stanley is portrayed by David Alan Moore, a talented baritone with a buff body who inhabits the role nicely. Directly after playing Stanley with the Hampton Roads company, Moore flies to Chicago where he will cover the role for Lyric Opera of Chicago, one of the nation’s leading companies.
Though Thompson says “Streetcar” was on his short list of American operas to present in Hampton Roads, he felt it was equally important to find the right singers to bring it to the stage.
Two years ago, he was watching rehearsals of “Die Valkure” at Virginia Opera when he saw Kelly Cae Hogan perform.
“It occurred to me that Kelly was absolutely right for Blanche, so essentially the opera is being done for her,” he says. “She’s an experienced, established artist who has the right voice and the right look.” The third character, Stella, is being sung by Julia Ebner.
In reviewing the premiere production for the New York Times, critic Bernard Holland wrote, “‘A Streetcar Named Desire” is so operatic as a play that one wonders why more than 50 years have passed since its Broadway opening with no opera of note being made of it.”
Williams’ poetic language and his over-the-top characters seem perfectly suited for operatic treatment rather than a more literal treatment.
“There’s no way to put a rape scene on stage…the audience is always going to know you are faking it,” says Helfrich. “So I decided to start with a violent gesture and take the scene somewhere else. Previn wrote a 3 1/2 minute musical interlude here, so instead of focusing on Stanley and Blanche, I focus on everyone else in the room.”
Pelto says much of the tension and the psychological motivations of the characters can be found in Previn’s music. It’s a difficult score, with highs and lows for the singers, he says, and “it requires a very free musical approach from them.
“There are moments of real tonality in several areas, and psychologically, it’s all there and that’s the most important thing,” says Pelto. “My challenge is to find that truth and bring it out.”
For Thompson, productions like “A Streetcar Named Desire” are the answer to building a future generation of opera-goers.
“There’s a switch that goes on inside all of us, even teenagers, when they’re in front of a live operatic performance,” he says. “It can’t be duplicated anywhere. That is part of an opera company’s job.”
Want to go?
What: Virginia Opera’s “A Streetcar Named Desire”
When: Opening night, 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 16. Additional performances, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 20; 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 22; and 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 24.
Where: Harrison Opera House, 160 E. Virginia Beach Blvd., Norfolk.
Tickets: $25-$114 by calling 757-877-2550 or online at http://www.vaopera.org.
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By David Nicholson
© February 10