This was an unexpectedly musical week for us. I started it out not even remembering we had a Dallas Symphony Orchestra concert on Saturday (last) night, and ended up seeing two world premiere performances and a very rare performance of a piece dear to our hearts.
The first new acquaintance was The Dallas Opera’s production of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, composed by Jake Heggie. The Dallas Opera, in conjunction with several other opera companies, commissioned Mr. Heggie to write a new opera for the inaugural season of Dallas’ first dedicated opera house, the Winspear (our second new acquaintance). It’s gotten excellent reviews, so we wanted to get to it somehow. Sharon managed to score a couple of musician’s comp tickets from a friend in the orchestra, so we had free nosebleed seats up in the grand tier. (The only available public tickets were $300 apiece, which was out of the question.) It was a great evening.
The opera was compelling and easy to follow, and the set – which I’m sure could only be done at a modern theater like the Winspear – was spare, yet terrific. It was cast as the inside of a ship’s hull, so the deck (which is, incidentally, what the stage floor is actually called) curves up as it goes upstage (to the rear) until it’s vertical. There are three sets of rungs that go up onto this wall, and chorus members and supers would climb up onto them…and when they had to go downstage (to the front) or exit, they’d jump off and slide down to the level section , just like a kid’s slide! Large, two-sided ladders rose up into the fly loft above the stage, and the entire cast clambered up and down them the whole production. (I’m told the casting call required one be “fearless of heights”.) And the center section of the hull could pivot forward, revealing a large platform for more action with large rendering stoves in the background.
The lighting was really innovative, showing that this was a 21st century opera. Some kind of computerized projector was used to create simple, yet evocative white line drawings I’ve never seen before in an opera. The opening sequence started with a slowly rotating star field which evolved into a sailing ship that grew, and grew until its bow filled the stage. Other images later in the opera had you flying over and around the ship, kind of like the sequence in the Titanic movie. Finally, the lighting was used to remarkable effect to turn the three sets of rungs upstage into three longboats on the water! The longboat crews sat on the rungs, and longboat outlines, spotlights, and water effects were displayed around them. When a longboat was cracked up by the whale, all slid off the rungs and disappeared offstage while a rotating and breaking up drawing sequence made it perfectly clear what had happened.
This post is long enough already, so I’ll talk about the last “new and old” next time…
