Because of President Eisenhower\u2019s Executive Order 10450, as many as 10,000 federal workers lost their jobs during the next quarter-century. But today, a new purge is under way. A few seats to my right at Friday\u2019s opening-night performance of \u201cFellow Travelers\u201d was former U.S. Space Force Col. Bree Fram, who was forced to retire last year because of the Pentagon\u2019s new Executive Order 14183, which bans transgender service members.<\/p>\n
![\"Tenor](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/sut-l-stage-fellowtravelers1.jpg\")
Tenor Andy Acosta as Timothy Laughlin in the San Diego Opera\u2019s presentation of Up Until Now\u2019s touring production of the opera \u201cFellow Travelers,\u201d which played July 10-12 at the Balboa Theatre in San Diego. (Karli Cadel)<\/p>\n
There was an excited buzz in the audience before Friday\u2019s show among audience members, who saw this staging as a milestone cultural event. But during the fast-paced two-hour, 15-minute production, directed with power and grace by Kevin Newbury, there was a potent air of solemnity. Bruce Stasyna conducted the live orchestra.<\/p>\n
San Diego-based tenor Andy Acosta led the \u201cFellow Travelers\u201d cast as Timothy Laughlin, an eager, idealistic and conservative young Irish Catholic who arrives in Washington, D.C., with big dreams. But when he falls in love with the promiscuous State Department officer Hawkins \u201cHawk\u201d Fuller, Timothy finds himself torn between his passion, his faith and his career.<\/p>\n
Acosta delivered a standout acting and singing performance that transitioned from the stuttering vocal delivery of the nervous young newcomer to the confident, multi-octave vocal leaps of a man deeply in love and proud of his work as an anti-communist congressional speechwriter. His soul-searching \u201cI Died Last Night\u201d prayer aria was particularly powerful.<\/p>\n
Baritone Joseph Lattanzi was equally strong as Hawk, a reckless man who has grown comfortable taking risks. His final aria, a duet with Acosta, was especially moving. And soprano Amber R. Monroe brought richness and warmth to the opera, both with her singing and her maternalistic performance as the conflicted Mary, a closeted lesbian who works as Hawk\u2019s secretary.<\/p>\n
Unlike the music in many contemporary operas, Spears\u2019 \u201cFellow Travelers\u201d score is beautifully melodic, with rolling swells of strings and woodwinds\u00a0 instrumentation. Pierce\u2019s libretto, which is sung through, doesn\u2019t spare the darkness from this real period of history, but he created moments of joy, levity and romance.<\/p>\n
Newbury\u2019s staging features some office desks, filing cabinets and apartment furniture. But the most potent visual element of his production were the cast\u2019s nine singers, who often lined up behind a semitransparent scrim to watch the characters onstage, representing the ominous atmosphere of government surveillance.<\/p>\n
At the end of \u201cFellow Travelers,\u201d Timothy decides to leave Washington and its ever-growing web of investigations. In that powerful final scene, Acosta stood silently before a wall of photographs from the past 70 years of real-life LGBTQ workers who lost their federal jobs under these laws. At the very center of the photo collage was a portrait of Friday-night attendee Bree Fram in her dress uniform next to an American flag.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For many Americans, opera is seen as a dated art form with centuries-old stories they can\u2019t relate to.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":397100,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[7,7974,967,181,74,84,76,75,1058,420],"class_list":["post-397099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-california","tag-classical-music","tag-entertainment","tag-latest-headlines","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-county","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-theater","tag-things-to-do"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=397099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/397099\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=397099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=397099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}