With “The Recital,” LB Opera Signals Full Productions Are Now the Exception, Not the Rule

Since James Darrah took over as artistic director in 2021, it’s a matter of interpretation whether ambition or the lack of it is driving Long Beach Opera. His first production, 2021’s Les Enfant Terribles, was a wonder of imaginative, COVID-friendly programming, with performers spread out and roaming across the roof of a parking structure, while Darrah himself manned a video camera to send roving images of the main action to large screens for the car-bound audience’s viewing pleasure. More recently, this season’s opener, Kate Soper’s The Romance of the Rose, was one of the best productions in LBO’s history and may be the second Pulitzer Prize-winner world premiered by LBO in the last four years.

But from Darrah’s remarks during the 2023 season-closer “The Recital” — basically an opera-optional film festival with a bit of live performance — it sounds like offering fewer fully staged operas per year than at any time in Long Beach Opera’s history is the new normal.

Of the 13 films (nine animated and four live-action) that comprised the blocks bookending Day 2 of The Recital (Day 1’s programming was more or less identical), only two of the ten I saw unequivocally employed “opera.” Of the rest, three were pop/rock music videos, three had basically no music at all, and one was an absurdist pastiche heavily relying on exaggerated foley and fart jokes for the yuks. 

The “heart and backbone of this festival” (Darrah) was a pairing of a live performance of Franz Schubert’s song cycle Die schöne Müllerin with an animated film harvesting the same piece for music and plot. Although technically Die schöne Müllerin isn’t opera — Schubert never intended it to be staged — musically it fits the bill (even if Shubert’s melodic redundancy means the palette is rather monochromatic), and mezzo-soprano Hope Nelson was in command from start to finish. Staging — such as it was — consisted primarily of a digital background (largely screensaver-like animation of sylvan scenes), with Nelson given a few tasks to flesh out the text (she roams the countryside, swoons over the maid of the mill, hangs her lute on the wall). 

This was followed hard upon by Christopher at Sea, a film by festival co-curator Tom C.J. Brown that concerns an ostensibly straight man (he’s got a sweetheart back home) who obtains passage on a cargo ship and finds himself drowning in homoerotic impulses, which Brown deftly brings to life in a few expressionistic flights of fancy.

According to Darrah, Long Beach Opera is at “the forefront of the next frontier of opera” via the organization’s “commitment to explore the intersection” of opera and TV/film. He went so far as to say that “using opera and classical music for film [such as was highlighted in The Recital] is unique.” These are puzzling claims. Filmdom has been awash in opera/classical for most of its history — e.g., “Ride of the Valkyries” in The Birth of a Nation (1915), Luis Buñuel spinning classical gramophone records during screenings of Un Chien Andalou (1929), Aria’s (1987) ten short films (Altman, Godard, Roeg…) whose only audio are arias (Verdi, Wagner, Puccini…). And not only are plenty of other opera companies incorporating video/film, but Long Beach Opera has long been one of them. For example, 2016’s The News was far more ambitious on that front than anything we’ve seen on Darrah’s watch.

Although his assessment of his proximity to the vanguard is overblown, there’s no doubting Darrah’s enthusiasm, just as there’s no question that he’s moving Long Beach Opera increasingly further from the traditional. But how that plays with the ticket-buying public is an open question. Not too long ago I spoke with a pair of LBO season subscribers who were incensed that The Horse — which wasn’t opera in any sense of the word — was one of the four shows they got for their money this year. 

Of course, The Horse simply wasn’t good. And considering that it was in effect the product of an outside contractor, its inclusion this season — just one month after The Romance of the Rose — smacked of LBO’s wanting to deliver programming without really putting in the work. 

During a Q&A following Christopher at Sea, Brown said that “the most exciting thing about opera” is the variety of people and talents — vocalists, musicians, costumers, set and lighting designers, etc. — coming together to create grand works of art in the moment. 

Ironically, this is exactly what Long Beach Opera is doing less than ever — and apparently that’s the plan. This is likely to lose patrons who turn up for the unique spectacle of full productions, but perhaps it has the potential to gain new ones. 

Ultimately, though, it is likely that James Darrah’s reign will be defined by the quality of what Long Beach Opera offers, rather than how close it hews to traditional preconceptions of what opera is supposed to be.