- #GIRLS OF THE GOLDEN WEST SF OPERA HOW TO#
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Peters links the lively and lightweight with the significance of his story easily and with depth. Tenor Paul Appleby plays Joe Cannon, the balladeer and runaround, with panache while bass-baritone Ryan McKinny takes Clarence, baritone Elliot Madore interprets the mournful Ramon with tender sincerity, and baritone Davone Tines plays the handsome Ned Peerless Peters, who lifts the story of slavery into the dimension of significance it deserves.
#GIRLS OF THE GOLDEN WEST SF OPERA HOW TO#
The girls show us both their struggles in their dust-laden, mud-filled world, but how to hold themselves accountable despite its injustice and violence. And Julia Bullock, Dame Shirley, was narrator and actor in a quasi-Wilder, “Our Town” flavor, with full, resonant and richly appealing voice. She carries the narrative throughout with grace and presence, a job that is more than Herculean. Ah Sing was played by Korean Soprano Hye Jung Lee, with deft, piquante daintiness and vocal swell. We got to know Josefa, played by mezzo J’Nai Bridges with a lustrous and soulful solitude, in the midst of all the feverish byplay. Instead of just a quasi-plot, we have the spliced trio of stories of the titular girls themselves – and from the women’s rather than the men’s points of view. It might make sense to illustrate the tumult of the times, but to fulfill the function of getting inside the situation, less might have been more.Īct two fared much better: a through-line that had dramatic punch on an official day: the Fourth of July. It’s hard to get deeper into story when things are constantly in motion, especially if gratuitous. If anything, fewer moving objects, suspensions and disappearances would have been welcome. We have muted costumes for the chorus, welcome shades of color for the soloists, rich use of the whole stage, down and up, and side to side. With courtesy, we still want to say – Make up your mind, Folks – are we for the Real? We learn of Ah Sing being sold by her mother for seven dollars, but worth $700 at the end we hear of Josefa’s first rendezvous with Ramon and Dame Shirley’s clunky relationship with the sewn-up tight husband who the opera weaves in and out like a thread that has lost all elasticity. Where were we going – into the comic? Into the stark? Into the symbolic? Act one was, in fact, a carefully-designed throw-together of place and time and people – their stories told, often in elaborate detail. The audience wasn’t sure whether this was a lark or serious gesture. In fact, small details such as the suspended covered wagon, more than aptly dramatized by Ned Peerless Peters and Dame Shirley jogging and rocking on land in an imaginary one, needed no visual accompaniment, especially when, after it was all over, the wagon literally descended on stage, only to rise again and disappear for good. The same went for the made-up mule Dame Shirley dragged into the first act for no substantive reason. If anything, some of that detail could be sacrificed, particularly since, in Act one, Sellars and Adams told us little new.
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While not “Deadwood,” the cable TV show, nor Puccini’s colorful “La Fanciulla,” “Girls” introduces similar locales such as the Gambling hall, the Bar, the woods and mountains, the bedroom. The two acts with five scenes each detail the story of the Gold Rush and its environs. When the Chorus added itself, with its intriguing refrains and repetitions, we were lifted with the score’s excitement and celebrated the multi-national, multi-cultural brocade that is America.
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Woodblocks and bells, full and rich brass alternated in a wide range of rhythm and syncopations. Gershon, in his San Francisco debut, led the 67-piece orchestra with energy, aplomb and fervor instead of accompanying the singers, he led them, and us. Atomic,” on the maker of the atomic bomb, for example, Adams uses the sublime form of opera to address our human and cultural dimension and creates a very good and penetrating marriage. Adams’s music maps the textures of this world it mirrors. It was a time when greed, violence, and hypocrisy lived out its destiny. It’s a time when women were in danger of enjoying freedom, rather than the other way around. We crossed its border, we were reminded, not the other way around. SFPLibrary’s Documents’ Division, to Mark Twain’s “Roughing It.” The title is partly lifted from Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West” and the work itself is less of a dramatic than narrative excursion into the world of the Gold Rush in 1849, when California was still Mexico. The story is the result of a culling of documents and texts ranging from letters of Dame Shirley, a.k.a., Louise Clapp, v.
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