5/31/2023 0 Comments The planets composer![]() Composer Roumain delivers a soaring lament exactly when it’s needed. ![]() Most of the easily accessible melody and true emotional punch arrive after intermission in “Proximity.” This is when Whitney Morrison takes center stage as another real-life character, Yasmine Miller, whose son was shot and killed in a drive-by. In Friday’s performance, Zoie Reams (who also sings a key role in “The Walkers”) was waylaid by a throat infection in her place, Katherine DeYoung got the aerial and ground-level job done as a combination prophet and fretter, wondering what will become of a planet suffering the effects of environmental despoilment and other ruinous acts. She worries about the place, and puzzles over “the clockwork that drives the stunned machine.” By evening’s end, the city of Chicago has taken the part of that stunned machine. It is a leap for “Proximity” to interpolate in any truly effective way the third and, by far, briefest opera, “Night.” Showcasing an eerily languid score by John Luther Adams based on a poem by the late John Haines, the oratorio-like work finds the mythological oracle Sibyl floating among the stars, eyeing the distant blue planet Earth. Through the middle of what feels impossible.” It’s as if A’s forlorn emotional state has become its own Alexa. ![]() The evening’s sole sustained dose of humor emerges in a scene where “A” drives home, alone, accompanied by the sound and dubious advice of a weirdly philosophical GPS system. Throughout “Four Portraits” Clarke deploys splendid, artfully manipulated methods to capture the sound of digital frustration and sentence fragments mucked up by lousy Wi-Fi. The vocal lines, picked out amid a chorus of an anonymous crowd of other people getting off a train (Sondheim got there first, of course) go this way, in interrupted snippets: We meet the woman known as B (Lucia Lucas) mid-cellphone call with her partner, A (John Holiday). Here the inspired composer and co-librettist Caroline Shaw creates with librettist Jocelyn Clarke a wry, forlorn story of a relationship breakup’s aftermath, its parted lovers set against a sea of isolating technological dependency. The way it unfolds, we drop into “The Walkers” for a scene, then switch over to the second of the three one-acts, “Four Portraits,” for its first scene. Secretary of Education and onetime CEO of Chicago Public Schools? More on that in a moment. Toler’s CRED cohort, Arne Duncan, is another major real-life figure in “The Walkers.” How does “Proximity” depict the former U.S. Curtis Toler (Issachah Savage) is one of them he’s the Chicago CRED outreach director and violence de-escalation specialist, a former member of the South Side Black P. The walkers of the one-act opera’s title? Three men: one fictional (Preacher Man), two real. Set in Chicago, as are - more metaphorically - the other two operas here, “The Walkers” started with Smith’s interviews with staffers and associates of Chicago CRED, the nonprofit designed to ease gun violence and increase economic opportunities here.Īnother fictional character, young Lil’ Bunchy Bates (Jamion Cotten), finds himself in the crosshairs of rival gangs. (Smith’s own solo version of her LA-riots mosaic, “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,″ remains a peak theatergoing experience for me.) These are then interpreted by performers for fresh revelations of perspective. Smith is best known for her work in the nonfiction realm, grounded in copious interviews with an array of subjects. The evening’s dominant one-act, titled “The Walkers,” finds librettist Anna Deavere Smith in collaboration with composer Daniel Bernard Roumain. Director Yuval Sharon’s trio of works has been put into what Sharon calls “shuffle” mode the three one-act operas are no longer separate, having been braided by Sharon and co-curator Renée Fleming, into a single multi-strand narrative examining our carelessly tended city, nation and planet. When it works, the production catches something - many things - about human connections we’ve trashed en route to the warring tribes we’ve become. The result - the unwieldy and often striking “Promixity” - made its world premiere at Lyric Opera House Friday. ![]() ![]() Here in Chicago, we have a newly minted trio of one-act operas commissioned by Lyric Opera of Chicago from three separate composer-and-librettist teams working on aesthetically different planets. ![]()
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