Opera Philadelphia is known to be on the cutting edge of the genre. Sure, they do the classics from time to time, but some of the most exciting performances have been modern stories from new composers.
The Philadelphia premiere of “Suddenly Last Summer” by Courtney Bryan, based on Tennessee Williams’ gothic southern drama, will hit the Forrest Theatre Oct. 22, 23 and 25. For more information and tickets, go to www.operaphila.org.
“ ‘Suddenly Last Summer’ is ultimately about who gets to tell the story, and who gets silenced,” Bryan said. “I was drawn to the complexity of Tennessee Williams’ world, to the beauty and terror of this Southern Gothic story, and especially to the questions it raises about power, sexuality, vulnerability, wealth and the ways that truth can be controlled. Bringing the work to Philadelphia is incredibly meaningful.”
“Suddenly Last Summer” is set between the Garden District of New Orleans and the Mediterranean coast.
The story centers on the mysterious death of the poet Sebastian Venable. Sebastian’s cousin, Catherine (soprano Mikaela Bennett), witnessed his final moments and returned to New Orleans consumed by the need to tell what she saw.
Sebastian’s wealthy and powerful mother, Mrs. Venable (played by Stephanie Roth Haberle), is determined to suppress Catherine’s account, going so far as to attempt to have her lobotomized so that the story can be erased from her memory.
The opera transforms Williams’ confrontation between competing versions of reality into a striking musical premise: The character who tells the truth is given the power of song, while those attempting to control the narrative speak.
“A lot of my work is intense,” Bryan said. “I tend to be drawn to different stories, either of historical figures or contemporary events that have an intensity. This one was interesting because it’s just a different kind of intensity and the grotesqueness of the story was interesting.
“But, I kept coming back to it because I was excited about the idea of the collaborators, and then I was excited about how Tennessee Williams really brings you into his world. It’s like once you read certain things, I feel like I just kept thinking about it and trying to understand the characters and must think about how he would write about certain details that were very evocative and made me want to create music.”
This is Bryan’s first opera, but she has been writing music and performing for as long as she can remember.
“When I was 5 (years old), I started studying piano,” said Bryan, who grew up in New Orleans. “I would call myself self-taught as a composer at that age, because I was always creating original music. My parents would help me record it and make sure I kept records of it and everything.
“I would write for my friends. So that’s when I started learning to write for different instruments. I was like, ‘Oh yeah, how does a trumpet work? Like, what about this range?’ or I wrote for a lot of my vocalist friends, and I always enjoyed writing for voice.”
Bryan’s score for “Suddenly Last Summer” draws on the two worlds at the heart of Williams’ story: the lush Mediterranean landscape where Sebastian dies and the humid Garden District of New Orleans where Catherine returns.
Bryan spent time composing in both locations during the development of the opera. The resulting score incorporates an eclectic range of sounds, including bird song improvisations, suspended harmonies and musical gestures rooted in Bryan’s lifelong relationship with the sounds and traditions of her hometown.
“(The original story is) written very poetically, but its basically a scene of date rape,” said Bryan. “I wrote the piece and I just got into all the musical things of it. I just dove right into it. So I felt what I had was time to dive in fully and create on my own and then step away from it, and then have workshop time together, and then take from that and then create again. So there was enough time to kind of get fully into the world and then kind of step back from it and then workshop together and, and that really helped to make the project the way we did.”
The production was conceived by Daniel Fish, whose radical 2019 staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical after transferring from the Fisher Center at Bard to Broadway and subsequently won the Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival in London.
Bryan saw “Oklahoma!” and was inspired to write the opera.
“I’m very excited,” Bryan said. “It’s all coming real, because I had the date and it was sometime way in the future. It felt far away when we were doing the original one, but it’s actually here.”