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Last Updated: Jul 7, 2008 - 10:08:41 AM
The music of 'Angels'
By Arnold Wayne Jones
May 15, 2008 - 5:06:23 PM
‘Angels in America’ was already operatic. Now it’s an actual opera.
How Darren Woods brought the musical adaptation of Tony Kushner’s landmark AIDS play to Fort Worth
Darren Woods has loved opera most of his adult life. For nearly 30 years, he has been fully involved in the world of opera — first as a singer and, for the past seven years, as general director of the Fort Worth Opera. In that time, he’s sung in or mounted hundreds of productions.
But he gets choked up when talking about the show that launches the FWO’s 61st season — one more personal to him than perhaps any opera he has ever worked on: “Angels in America.”
“Angels” tells the story of Prior Walter (played in the opera by David Adam Moore), who contracts HIV and is almost immediately abandoned by his lover, Louis (Scott Scully). Louis takes up with Joe (Craig Verm), a married, closeted Republican grappling with his sexuality.
Woods and his close friend David Gately (the stage director of “Angels”) both came out in the early 1980s, around the same time that AIDS first began to devastate the gay community — and taking its toll on the opera world.
“Everybody we knew was dying,” Woods says, his voice cracking with emotion. “Part of the reason I’m passionate about the play is, we lived through this [plague] and no one should forget it.”
The play forcefully challenges the Reagan-era handling of the AIDS crisis, embodied by Roy Cohn, a conservative powerbroker in denial about his own illness. Which is why so far Woods has been equivocal about all three previous productions of the opera — two in Europe and one in Boston.
“I’ve seen them all. The European productions didn’t understand the political overtones,” Woods says. “The absence of the political really bothers me — it speaks to me, but doesn’t capture the humor or tenor of the plays. Opera Boston did a fine job on a small scale, but [in ours] the angel will actually fly through the roof and carry Prior off with her. Our production is as cinematic as Kushner wrote it.”
Ironically enough, Tony Kushner — who won two Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for his two-part “gay fantasia on national themes” — had nothing to do with adapting the opera at all.
“I spoke to [composer] Peter [Eotvos] and his wife a couple of times, that’s it,” says Kushner from his home in New York. (Coincidentally, Kushner will be in Dallas this week for a separate appearance. See sidebar on Page 26.)
“I was a little surprised he wanted to do ‘Angels’ as an opera and even more surprised he wanted to do the whole story. ‘Angels’ is up there with the Ring Cycle in terms of text or libretto — 300 pages or more — and a lot happens in it. The length is part of what it is about, the epic quality. I didn’t suppose he could do what he was proposing. But he really wanted to get the whole story in there, and I thought it was fair game at this point.”
From epic to opera
“Angels” has often been described as “operatic,” but Kushner always saw it as something slightly different: a symphony.
“A number of people mentioned its operatic quality, these arias and larger than life figures,” he says. “I was happy about that — I’m a great opera fan. And I was conscious about thinking of it as a piece of music” while he was writing it.
Part One, he says, was structured as a musical piece, with Joe and Harper on one side, Prior and Louis on the other, and Roy was a line up the middle; Part Two was intended “as a completely new set of themes derived from the first. I listened to a lot of symphonies when I was working on the piece, which I found useful,” he says.
Moore echoes that observation: “You can hear the musicality when you see it on the page.”
But if music weaves its way through the fabric of the show, equally important to Woods was the emotional content. For him, that meant the cast couldn’t just sing the words — they had to convey the power of the story.
“When I’d seen it before, straight men were playing the part of Prior and there was nothing believably gay about them,” he says. So when Moore’s agent approached Woods, he initially dismissed the idea. “I said, ‘I can’t have a straight guy playing this part.’”
Eventually, Woods agreed to see Moore in a production of “The Little Prince” in Oklahoma. Afterward, the two spent 90 minutes together riding in a car.
“I got really obsessed about the role when my agent started talking about it,” says Moore, who dropped 20 lbs. to play an AIDS victim more convincingly. “I knew enough about the piece to know I was very interested in doing it, and did a lot of research, a lot of my character study, in the week before I met with Darren.”
“He convinced me he was the one,” Woods now admits.
One reason was Moore’s own story of loss.
“I am intimately familiar with sickness and death,” Moore says, who “met the love of my life” in college, only to lose her to cancer at age 25. Watching her body break down contributed to his understanding, and performing the role “has been very therapeutic,” he says.
Moore also grew up only 30 miles from Kushner’s hometown of Lake Charles, La. But he isn’t the only one whose own life informs his performance. Several of the cast members have had experiences like their characters.
“I wanted a religious guy to play Joe — someone with that innocence of not comprehending his orientation,” Woods says. “I can’t believe how perfect the cast is.”
Moore agrees. “There is some typecasting in the show,” he says.
Nevertheless, condensing the seven hours of both plays into a single production of less than three hours was no easy feat, especially considering that Moore describes Eotvos’ music as “the second most difficult score I’ve ever looked at, and this is the hardest diatonic music I’ve ever done.”
But the production has been re-imagined in significant ways: Synthesizers are played, and the actors wear microphones (virtually unheard of in opera). Woods also incorporated video elements, which they pioneered last year with the world premier of Tom Pasatieri’s “Frau Margot.” And instead of the usual stable of extras, this show has several musclemen serving as supernumeraries.
All of which explains, in part, why “Angels” will not be performed at Bass Hall, alongside the FWO’s other productions this season (“Of Mice and Men,” “Turandot” and “Lucia di Lammermoor”). Instead, it will be staged at the smaller Scott Theatre at the Fort Worth Community Center (although there will be more performances of “Angels” than the other three combined).
“It’s funny when people go to the opera house and hear ‘fuck’ for the first time, it shocks them — but they hear it in the movies all the time,” Woods laughs. Add to that the subject matter, and Woods decided he “didn’t want to put it anywhere near Bass Hall — it comes with a completely different set of expectations.”
One reason, he admits, is the overtly gay content, virtually nonexistent in most operas — a puzzling oversight.
“There is an identifiable community of gay men that has had a remarkable relationship with opera,” Kushner says. “If you look at old issues of Opera News from the late ‘50s, you will find ads where gay men are looking for one another. There’s a sort of gay quality to opera, but it’s almost never that you see gay characters on stage except in drag roles. That said, ‘Angels’ is not the first opera with gay subtext.”
Subtext, maybe; there are homoerotic undertones in gay composer Benjamin Britten’s “Billy Budd” and “The Rape of Lucretia.” In fact, when Moore and Scully recently performed together in “Billy Budd” for director Gately, they all got a laugh out of one irony about next playing lovers in “Angels.”
“We were in the fight rehearsal and David was showing us how physical he wanted us to be,” Moore explains. “In the middle of rehearsal, he said, ‘Of course in the next opera, you’ll be doing something very different physically.’”
Still, without a doubt, nothing like “Angels” has ever been tried by the FWO — or most other major opera companies — before.
“The gay thing, as always, will be the last taboo,” Woods sighs resignedly.
And with “Angels,” gay North Texans should prepare to see that taboo finally fall.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition May 16, 2008.
How Darren Woods brought the musical adaptation of Tony Kushner’s landmark AIDS play to Fort Worth
 |
| FLIGHTS OF ANGELS: The Angel (Ava Pine) flies off with Prior Walter (David Adam Moore). - PHOTOS BY ELLEN APPEL |
Darren Woods has loved opera most of his adult life. For nearly 30 years, he has been fully involved in the world of opera — first as a singer and, for the past seven years, as general director of the Fort Worth Opera. In that time, he’s sung in or mounted hundreds of productions.
But he gets choked up when talking about the show that launches the FWO’s 61st season — one more personal to him than perhaps any opera he has ever worked on: “Angels in America.”
“Angels” tells the story of Prior Walter (played in the opera by David Adam Moore), who contracts HIV and is almost immediately abandoned by his lover, Louis (Scott Scully). Louis takes up with Joe (Craig Verm), a married, closeted Republican grappling with his sexuality.
Woods and his close friend David Gately (the stage director of “Angels”) both came out in the early 1980s, around the same time that AIDS first began to devastate the gay community — and taking its toll on the opera world.
“Everybody we knew was dying,” Woods says, his voice cracking with emotion. “Part of the reason I’m passionate about the play is, we lived through this [plague] and no one should forget it.”
The play forcefully challenges the Reagan-era handling of the AIDS crisis, embodied by Roy Cohn, a conservative powerbroker in denial about his own illness. Which is why so far Woods has been equivocal about all three previous productions of the opera — two in Europe and one in Boston.
“I’ve seen them all. The European productions didn’t understand the political overtones,” Woods says. “The absence of the political really bothers me — it speaks to me, but doesn’t capture the humor or tenor of the plays. Opera Boston did a fine job on a small scale, but [in ours] the angel will actually fly through the roof and carry Prior off with her. Our production is as cinematic as Kushner wrote it.”
Ironically enough, Tony Kushner — who won two Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for his two-part “gay fantasia on national themes” — had nothing to do with adapting the opera at all.
“I spoke to [composer] Peter [Eotvos] and his wife a couple of times, that’s it,” says Kushner from his home in New York. (Coincidentally, Kushner will be in Dallas this week for a separate appearance. See sidebar on Page 26.)
“I was a little surprised he wanted to do ‘Angels’ as an opera and even more surprised he wanted to do the whole story. ‘Angels’ is up there with the Ring Cycle in terms of text or libretto — 300 pages or more — and a lot happens in it. The length is part of what it is about, the epic quality. I didn’t suppose he could do what he was proposing. But he really wanted to get the whole story in there, and I thought it was fair game at this point.”
From epic to opera
|
| FLIGHTS OF ANGELS: The Angel (Ava Pine) flies off with Prior Walter (David Adam Moore). - PHOTOS BY ELLEN APPEL |
“Angels” has often been described as “operatic,” but Kushner always saw it as something slightly different: a symphony.
“A number of people mentioned its operatic quality, these arias and larger than life figures,” he says. “I was happy about that — I’m a great opera fan. And I was conscious about thinking of it as a piece of music” while he was writing it.
Part One, he says, was structured as a musical piece, with Joe and Harper on one side, Prior and Louis on the other, and Roy was a line up the middle; Part Two was intended “as a completely new set of themes derived from the first. I listened to a lot of symphonies when I was working on the piece, which I found useful,” he says.
Moore echoes that observation: “You can hear the musicality when you see it on the page.”
But if music weaves its way through the fabric of the show, equally important to Woods was the emotional content. For him, that meant the cast couldn’t just sing the words — they had to convey the power of the story.
“When I’d seen it before, straight men were playing the part of Prior and there was nothing believably gay about them,” he says. So when Moore’s agent approached Woods, he initially dismissed the idea. “I said, ‘I can’t have a straight guy playing this part.’”
Eventually, Woods agreed to see Moore in a production of “The Little Prince” in Oklahoma. Afterward, the two spent 90 minutes together riding in a car.
“I got really obsessed about the role when my agent started talking about it,” says Moore, who dropped 20 lbs. to play an AIDS victim more convincingly. “I knew enough about the piece to know I was very interested in doing it, and did a lot of research, a lot of my character study, in the week before I met with Darren.”
“He convinced me he was the one,” Woods now admits.
One reason was Moore’s own story of loss.
“I am intimately familiar with sickness and death,” Moore says, who “met the love of my life” in college, only to lose her to cancer at age 25. Watching her body break down contributed to his understanding, and performing the role “has been very therapeutic,” he says.
Moore also grew up only 30 miles from Kushner’s hometown of Lake Charles, La. But he isn’t the only one whose own life informs his performance. Several of the cast members have had experiences like their characters.
“I wanted a religious guy to play Joe — someone with that innocence of not comprehending his orientation,” Woods says. “I can’t believe how perfect the cast is.”
Moore agrees. “There is some typecasting in the show,” he says.
Nevertheless, condensing the seven hours of both plays into a single production of less than three hours was no easy feat, especially considering that Moore describes Eotvos’ music as “the second most difficult score I’ve ever looked at, and this is the hardest diatonic music I’ve ever done.”
But the production has been re-imagined in significant ways: Synthesizers are played, and the actors wear microphones (virtually unheard of in opera). Woods also incorporated video elements, which they pioneered last year with the world premier of Tom Pasatieri’s “Frau Margot.” And instead of the usual stable of extras, this show has several musclemen serving as supernumeraries.
All of which explains, in part, why “Angels” will not be performed at Bass Hall, alongside the FWO’s other productions this season (“Of Mice and Men,” “Turandot” and “Lucia di Lammermoor”). Instead, it will be staged at the smaller Scott Theatre at the Fort Worth Community Center (although there will be more performances of “Angels” than the other three combined).
“It’s funny when people go to the opera house and hear ‘fuck’ for the first time, it shocks them — but they hear it in the movies all the time,” Woods laughs. Add to that the subject matter, and Woods decided he “didn’t want to put it anywhere near Bass Hall — it comes with a completely different set of expectations.”
One reason, he admits, is the overtly gay content, virtually nonexistent in most operas — a puzzling oversight.
“There is an identifiable community of gay men that has had a remarkable relationship with opera,” Kushner says. “If you look at old issues of Opera News from the late ‘50s, you will find ads where gay men are looking for one another. There’s a sort of gay quality to opera, but it’s almost never that you see gay characters on stage except in drag roles. That said, ‘Angels’ is not the first opera with gay subtext.”
Subtext, maybe; there are homoerotic undertones in gay composer Benjamin Britten’s “Billy Budd” and “The Rape of Lucretia.” In fact, when Moore and Scully recently performed together in “Billy Budd” for director Gately, they all got a laugh out of one irony about next playing lovers in “Angels.”
“We were in the fight rehearsal and David was showing us how physical he wanted us to be,” Moore explains. “In the middle of rehearsal, he said, ‘Of course in the next opera, you’ll be doing something very different physically.’”
Still, without a doubt, nothing like “Angels” has ever been tried by the FWO — or most other major opera companies — before.
“The gay thing, as always, will be the last taboo,” Woods sighs resignedly.
And with “Angels,” gay North Texans should prepare to see that taboo finally fall.
|
ANGELS AMONG US |
| “Angels in America: The Opera,” Scott Theatre at the Fort Worth Community Center, 1300 Gendy St., Fort Worth. “Angels” performances May 16, 28 and June 4 at 8 p.m., May 18, 24, 31 and June 7 at 2 p.m. $17–$52. 877-396-7372. FWOpera.org. |
|
Arts & Letters Live: Tony Kushner, Kalita Humphreys Theater, 3636 Turtle Creek Blvd. May 21 at 7:30 p.m. DallasMuseumofArt.org/ALL |
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition May 16, 2008.
© Copyright by DallasVoice.com
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