Opera. That word, weighed down by expectations and stereotypes in the public imagination and self-fulfilling prophecies on the part of composers and performers.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. “Opera” is just an overly general label for a vocal tradition typically embedded in the grandiose. An artist can harness the operatic in whatever ways her heart desires.
Inspired by the 13th-century epic poem Le roman de la rose, Kate Soper’s heart has led her to write a metafictional dream(er(s))-within-a-dream exploration of loving and being, scored in a variety of styles for seven voices and a nine-piece orchestra including electric guitar and “electronics” and making use of effects with names like reverse and plate reverb. The Romance of the Rose is “modern opera,” kids — and it’s state-of-the-art in many of the best senses.
Following a decentering silence (à la John Cage’s 4’33”) and a fun-with-spotlights bit, we meet The Dreamer (Lucas Steele), our ostensible emcee/guide. He briefly holds forth on the edifying value of dreams, then tells us that the one we’re about to have/witness (get used to blurred lines) is a love story. Enter The God of Love (Phillip Bullock), Lady Reason (Anna Schubert), and Shame (Laurel Irene), “your allegorical dramatis personae!” The Dreamer selects a volunteer from the audience, whom he labels “The Lover” (Tivoli Treloar), and we’re off and running.
Not surprisingly, in her/our dream the audience member-cum-Lover is shocked to find she has a “new voice” — a powerful and fluid mezzo-soprano, don’tcha know — and in the Garden of Love she meets Idleness (Tiffany Townsend) and Pleasure (Bernardo Bermudez), before their boss makes the scene in gentle layers of purple & pink and shoots The Lover full of arrows. But is she in love with a rose? Wait: is she a rose? Whatever the case, her relation to love vacillates depending on whose company she keeps. Is Lady Reason right that our feelings — including our response to music (I warned you about the meta) — are just the manipulation of neurochemicals &c? Shame certainly seconds that emotion.
Playing the “dream logic” card (as Soper does explicitly) is good cover for a certain looseness (blurred lines, blurred lines), and it’s all hella fun partly because of how fully Soper delivers on concept. The God of Love sings almost exclusively in the original French (Soper freely moves between the source, her own apt text, and a smattering of others’ word); Lady Reason’s vocoder-saturated soprano reflects the metallic coldness of her arguments; and Shame slurs and spits mocking diatribes (“Love is a fraud / A hymn that’s fit for the junkyard”) in washes of processing and distorted guitar. The distinctness of these sonic signatures, combined with how well Soper has composed for all seven singers — allowing them to soar without ever bogging down the proceedings in meandering vocal acrobatics — heightens our moment-to-moment engagement. (And this is without even getting into the interesting cross-pollination of signatures as different facets of the love experience bleed into each other.)
Director James Darrah does just about everything right to bring Soper’s lovely dream to life. Start with the cast. From his opening moments on stage, before anyone’s sung a note, Steele’s precise bodywork and syllable-sharp command of text absorbs our attention when there’s nothing else to soak it up, a discipline maintained in his singing. As The Lover, Treloar’s seemingly effortless command of every note, regardless of how she’s called upon to act or move during the utterance, is just: wow. As Lady Reason and Shame, Schubert and Irene are spot-on with their respective signature singing styles, then equally fine when they spread their wings more widely in Act Two.
Visually, Pablo Santiago’s sharp lighting by turns highlights and color-saturates the watery white tile dominating Prairie T. Trivuth’s Zenfully minimalist set, which fully extends to all edges of the frame. The sole failing is the flora, whose fauxness, perhaps overlookable in Act One, is too conspicuous under later lighting cues. Meanwhile, but for one puzzling exception related to Lady Reason’s final reveal, Molly Irelan’s costumery gets consistently high marks not just for its wide, energetic palette (swatches of neon, a spectrum of blue) and style (paisley-adjacent patterns) but even touches like the slow billow of The God of Love’s robe as he sweeps offstage.
One of Soper’s only missteps is the redundancy of Lady Reason’s assertions (usually delivered in a mechanized monotone that underlines said redundancy): love is a distortion, irrationality, mere “psychological symptoms,” lacks an objective basis, etc., etc. Okay, okay, we get it. There’s also an occasional lack of internal consistency. While Lady Reason’s informed pedanticism is great fun, Soper could have weeded out a few bits of obvious claptrap (e.g., “Neurotransmitters deactivating”).
Then there’s the end of Act One. Soper brings us to an ideal entr’acte point, but the blackout we’re completely right to expect is preempted by one more scene with two additional songs, the first of which, another of Shame’s diatribes, both fails to provide anything needful and serves to diminish the overall effect of her signature sound (see Less is more). Transplanting whatever’s truly essential in this scene to after intermission would improve what is a generally fantastic flow.
But that’s tricky, because Act Two is perfect as-is. Early on we find ourselves in a phantasy bar where Townsend and Bermudez soulfully ignite a torch song whose hypnotic piano theme wouldn’t have been out of place in the late-‘70s pop charts. This segues into a drum-and-bass coda for Schubert’s entry, during which she occasionally plonks a bottle and tings a glass in perfect syncopation. Lovely as this is, it’s mere prelude. Always funny when Soper wants her to be, here Schubert absolutely slays as Lady Reason tries to prove she’s so hip to what “love” really is that she can fake her way through it. A few minutes later comes a subtly mesmerizing bit of shadowplay between Bermudez and Treloar, and before long we get those aforementioned motif-breaking arias by Schubert and Irene, the latter of which particularly transcends due to not only to the quality of song and performance but also how careful Soper has been not to telegraph the moment.
A quick note on Carlos Mosquera’s sound design: superfab. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that, under the guidance of Christopher Rountree, the orchestra is equally masterful in all the paces Soper puts them through (“classical,” aggro, Glass); and there isn’t a combination of singers (Soper brilliantly exploits just about every possible permutation) that doesn’t resonate gloriously.
Brave from start to finish in its alchemy of music, spoken word, and silence, The Romance of the Rose closes with a nice touch of scrim as we come out his/her/their/our dream and focus on The Dreamer (is he awake? Do we see reality? Blurred lines, baby) and into a music-free moment of unstylized pathos. Nice as it is on the page, it would fall flat as a soggy pancake and end a banging show with a whimper but for an actor able to locate the requisite simple, true, unoperatic humanity. Fortunately, Steele is exactly where he needs to be.
A short digression: In 1985, Kate Bush drew on musical traditions and technologies both modern and medieval, harnessing chorale and caterwaul on the way to creating Hounds of Love, a genre-defying, operatic exploration of love and dreams and visions.
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find that Bush was among Soper’s inspirations for everything from the sounds of Shame and Lady Reason right on down to quoting Tennyson. But whatever the case, while The Romance of the Rose may be easier to categorize than that other Kate’s magnum opus (opera, right? This is Long Beach Opera, after all…), Soper has similarly flown free of the fetters of convention to make smart art by following wherever her heart leads. And for its world premiere, James Darrah & company have shepherded this great work safely home. The Romance of the Rose isn’t quite perfect, but all in all it may be the best opera I’ve ever seen — and it’s certainly my fave. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways….
The Romance of the Rose will be performed on Saturday, February 25, at 7:30 p.m.
Cost: $55 to $165
Details: (562) 432-5934; LongBeachOpera.org
Venue: Warner Grand Theater, 478 W. 6th St., San Pedro