Nathan Gunn (Yeshua) and Sasha Cooke (Mary Magalene) Photo by J. Henry Fair
Mark Adamo's The Gospel of Mary Magdalene will have its world premiere at the War Memorial Opera House on June 19, for seven performances through July 7. As recent SFCV video reports show, the production is nearing completion, but there is a great deal of work yet to be done.
Sasha Cooke has the title role, opposite the Yeshua of Nathan Gunn, Maria Kanyova is Yeshua’s mother Miriam and William Burden is the the disciple Peter. Kevin Newbury is stage director, Michael Christie conducts.
In anticipation of the new opera, here's a look back at what Adamo wrote at the time of composing Little Women (1998) of differences and similarities between opera and musical theater:
... theater doesn’t encourage musical sophistication, only the sophisticated use of unsophisticated musical materials, which is why the only possible place that music-heavy shows like Rent or Les Miserables could be called operas would be on Broadway. The musical thinness is understandable, given the unreliable skills of that category "singing actor," which has covered everyone from elegant croaker Rex Harrison to opera-singers-on-Broadway Alfred Drake and Barbara Cook. And the musical’s up-from-songbook history has sown, if not active resistance, than striking disinterest in the idea of symphonic or motivic development as analogous to dramatic process.
Model of David Korins' set design Photo by Cory Weaver
Conversely, American opera hasn’t always encouraged theatrical sophistication, just the musically sophisticated elaboration of theatrically often simple-minded ideas. The skill-sets of the usual performers are again germane here, because the category of “acting singer” has included everyone from Lauren Flanigan to Luciano Pavarotti.
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As economic quantities, obviously, they’re part of different cultural categories: Musicals belong to the business of theater, which retains its shimmer of populism despite $80 Broadway tickets, while opera belongs to the business of “elitist” classical music. There are technical differences, too. Musicals are amplified these days (though ‘twas not ever thus): opera's not, for reasons good (few know how to do so either appropriately or creatively) and ill (the new fundamentalism about the sacrality of the acoustic voice, a catechism about as sensible as loyalty to gut strings or the fortepiano.) Composers orchestrate their own operas; theater composers almost never score their own shows.
I imagined writing the libretto for Broadway and the score for Lincoln Center, much as, I imagine, did the writers of Porgy and Bess and Candide. In every production so far, the farce scene that most regularly plays like that of a musical comedy is, coincidentally, the scene most driven by twelve-tone recitativo secco. When talking about opera and musical theatre, the operative word has to be AND.
