There are a dozen good reasons to go see Central City Opera’s production of “Dead Man Walking” and one good reason to hesitate. Which is to say you should go see it, and soon, since there are only seven performances remaining and it is a riveting show.
Jake Heggie’s epic tragedy, which premiered in 2000, is a truly significant American artwork. It has been resurrected three dozen times, rare for a contemporary title, and that has made it the standard to which all new operas aspire. It is important and influential just because it succeeded and putting it in your personal repertoire will help you understand where opera will go in the 21st century.
More than that, it is a calamitous joy to behold. Heggie’s music, complicated yet melodic, and Terrence McNally’s libretto, wise and clever, turn a detached subject — the ongoing debate over the death penalty in the U.S. — into a personal story. The piece is relevant, heartbreaking, fair to all sides.
Central City’s production, directed by Ken Cazan, uses the material to elicit memorable performances from every performer on stage. The singing is stirring and the acting as good as it gets in opera.
It’s hard to make this story feel fresh since many people know it already. The narrative follows the final days of Joseph de Rocher, on death row in a dank, Louisiana prison. But it is as much the story of the nun, Sister Helen Prejean, who is called to be his spiritual adviser at the end. As a public debate swirls outside the penitentiary walls, Prejean must overcome her own prejudices to forgive a man convicted of murdering two innocent teenagers.
Based on Prejean’s popular book, which was turned into a 1995 Hollywood blockbuster, the story presents the crime itself, a brutal rape and murder, as a prologue and weaves in the anguish of families, both the victim’s and the perpetrator’s.
There’s plenty of room in that for opera-level drama and it is especially poignant on the famously tiny stage in Central City. The sets have been reduced to a single prop in most scenes, a chair, a Coke machine, an execution gurney, and that makes way for the performers.
As de Rocher, Michael Mayes is downright scary, tattooed in swastikas, angry and insulting even to the woman present to save his soul. He understands the instancy present in a man with moments to live and he sings that way. He pushes his baritone as far as it will go into Heggie’s difficult score and he handles the touches of blues, rock and gospel the composer eases into the work.
That urgent tone drives the entire show and you hear it in the hurried songs of mezzo soprano Jennifer Rivera, relentlessly driven in the complex role of Sister Helen. She is called upon to be pious and comic at the same time and figures out a way to convey the mix vocally, hitting delicate high notes and broad, lyric expressions.
The score sets up two other memorable moments, which CCO’s show exploits well. One has de Rocher’s mother delivering a plaintive wail on behalf of her son to a parole board. It is an odd sort of aria, for sure, and mezzo Maria Zitchak soars with it.
Another has the families on stage all at once, trading quick lines that illustrate their grief. The lines are a Stephen Sondheim-style puzzle of interruption and overlap that is put together with stunning precision. The show also has influences of Bernstein, Gershwin and, in one of its lighter moments, Elvis Presley.
It is that mix of Broadway liveliness and cinematic intimacy that define this work (and many recent American operas it has influenced itself) . The music swells and stops to drive emotion the way a movie score does. At Central City, conductor John Baril let his orchestra play as if it were recording a soundtrack and it sounded melodramatic in all the right ways.
With its pop sensibilities and current-events agenda, “Dead Man Waling” is an ultra-contemporary thing, especially in an art form that most often sets its scenes and sensibilities in an older age. We live in a gritty time and Heggie and McNally are two artists that have turned it that way. They have written darkness into their piece, depravity, obscenity, fear.
An audience member might wish for more of that to come through in Central City where the production holds back at key moments. The libretto calls for nudity in the opening scene and a raw savagery in the rape. Neither are truly realized.
The children we see Sister Helen watching over as the piece opens are supposed to be poor, but they don’t seem disadvantaged at all, they beam with TV sit-com smiles and their haggard moms look like they just came from the mall. We are told the prison is a barbaric place, but it doesn’t feel so terrible, really.
These things may be meant to spare us — from something? — but they prevent the audience from wrestling with its own prejudices. The nudity is crucial, we are born that way, after all, and it evokes our most innocent qualities and exposes the terrible truths about the crime.
Because it has such a contemporary tone, “Dead Man Walking” can handle the same grimness people see every evening on network crime shows or participate in themselves in violent video games. If opera wants to go there, into this harrowing place, it has to go all the way.
Fortunately, Cazan lets the actors go for it in more direct ways and that prevents it from feeling like “Dead Man”-lite. Mayes’ performance is gripping, and so is the work from Rivera and Zitchak.
“Dead Man Walking” is opera’s big move into the real world. It feels true because it is, for the most part, true. And while it points the way toward the future, it lives very much in the present. In that way, it offers an experience that is unlike most operas. Which is to say again: Go, and soon.
Central City Opera’s “Dead Man Walking” continues through July 25. Tickets and info: 303-292-6700 centralcityopera.org.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi
