That Ned Rorem’s 2006 “Our Town” even gets produced is something of a miracle in an opera world where nearly all new inventions disappear a few fast minutes after their premiere.
But the work babbles on by knowing its place. Artful and intellectually driven, it is reasonable fare for the universities, conservatories and small companies that have resurrected it. Life in the operatic underground is still life and maybe the right one for a piece that is set partly in a cemetery and insists that being dead is preferable over walking the earth.
The Central City Opera House isn’t exactly a secret haven for opera, though it has its advantages as a home to this work, partly because it takes place in 1906, around the era of the historic building’s heyday. But it’s more than that.
Based on Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-winning play, the opera is wholly American, built on optimism, but tempered by the fact that prosperity is fleeting, that dreams can crash hard. You could say the same thing about the come-and-gone town of Central City itself.
Still, it is ambitious for the company to take on “Our Town.” Rorem and librettist J.D McClatchy stay true to Wilder’s vision best they can, which means minimal sets, a bit of pantomime and quick and non-chronological plot twists. In other words, there are few whacks on the head for those who might nod off during the middle act.
Rorem’s score has the sort of modified modern structure that seems to pick notes because of their place on the scale rather than their connection to human emotions. McClatchy gives up the story in verse, though not with any cadence that would get feet tapping.
There is no happy ending, of course. Young George and Emily spend two acts wooing and wedding in small-town New Hampshire; in the third she dies in childbirth. But don’t feel too bad for her.
She comes back in the afterlife, joins the chorus of dead New Englanders before her and realizes that human existence is temporary, and the living simply “don’t understand” that. The narrator/stage manager, in this production dressed in a contemporary black blazer and donning a headset, reminds us that people waste their days “straining away all the time.”
Rorem’s strength as a composer here is his own restraint. If life is a ruse as this play argues, he can’t give his singers genuine, heartfelt melodies until they are dead. That means two acts of something more akin to recitative dialogue than actual singing. That’s the right artistic choice, but it makes for a long wait.
And it raises the question: If Wilder’s play resists the transformation a musical score can give a play — if it doesn’t want to be opened up into song — should it be an opera at all? This is a fair question still; the work is only 7 years old.
Central City’s production offers a few good arguments for the opera. It does allow for some real singing and playing, and the cast, as well as the musicians beneath them, take advantage of that. The staging holds itself back, just a few tables and some white pickets fences that raise and lower, but it’s clever.
Plus, “Our Town” gives audiences something new to hear, something progressive, literary and not ridiculous like so many traditional operas can be. If those qualities sound appealing, this might be your ticket.
“Our Town” continues through July 28; Central City Opera House, 124 Eureka St., Central City. 303-292-6700 or centralcityopera.org.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi
