Opera Parallèle closed its 2023–2024 season with Fellow Travelers by composer Gregory Spears and librettist Greg Pierce, based on Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel of the same name. Set in 1950s Washington, D.C., Fellow Travelers recounts the romance between two deeply closeted gay men at a time when gay and lesbian people were largely banned from government employment and subject to investigation and firing if they were suspected of being gay.
Opera Parallèle’s production, the West Coast premiere of Fellow Travelers, is yet another outstanding effort from the company, with exceptional vocalism and acting from all of the principals, excellent direction by OP Creative Director Brian Staufenbiel, and fine leadership from guest conductor Jaymes Kirksey.
Fellow Travelers has proven to be exceptionally popular since its 2016 premiere, with Opera Parallèle’s production the latest of now more than a dozen presentations. The story remains highly relevant given the ongoing persecution of LGBTQ people in the United States and elsewhere, even in this post-Obergefell world.
The opera tells the story of Hawkins Fuller, a State Department employee, and Timothy Laughlin, a young reporter, who become clandestine lovers after meeting on a park bench in Dupont Circle. Fuller is older, more experienced, and more practiced in deception. Laughlin is naive, conservative, and a believing Catholic who thinks that ousting communists from the federal government is a good thing. If you’re thinking that they’re doomed as a couple, you’d be right. Fuller is ambitious enough to know the limits of what’s possible and cold enough to make sure he gets what he needs.
Spears’s musical language is surely part of the opera’s popularity. He composes in an appealing tonal idiom that’s indebted to minimalism. He writes beautifully for the voice, composing broad, eminently singable melodies and setting English in a way that respects its natural rhythms. Pierce expertly turns Mallon’s novel into a solid, dramatically apt, and singable libretto.
Spears decorates his melodies with turns and runs, which he describes in his program notes as “florid troubadour-like melodies, evocative of courtly longing, [that] represent the passionate inner life of the lovers.” I’d love to hear his choral music, some of which is written for ensembles that include recorders and other medieval and Renaissance instruments. He orchestrates with a light pastel palette.
But the relentless prettiness of the music sometimes works against the plot. When government officials subject Fuller to a lie-detector test, when the vile witch-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy appears onstage, and when Fuller behaves badly toward Laughlin, which he does more than once, you want more bite and darkness from the score.
Regardless, Fellow Travelers made for an absorbing evening at the opera on Friday, June 21. Baritone Joseph Lattanzi and tenor Jonathan Pierce Rhodes were firmly and superbly at the center of Opera Parallèle’s production as Fuller and Laughlin. Lattanzi, who created the role of Hawkins and has sung the part several times since, is handsome and well built, with a lovely baritone and the confident, almost swaggering manner that Fuller requires. Rhodes’s tenor, sizeable and sweet, was ideal for the shy and religious Timothy. He is rather more muscular than the slight Timothy of the novel, but his manner was always apt.
Rhodes is Black, and in the novel Timothy most certainly is white. Colorblind casting is and should be the norm in opera, but I admit to mild cognitive dissonance when Timothy was referred to as Irish (and also with a derogatory term for Irish people). At the same time, when Hawkins sang “I own you,” that phrase landed differently for this Timothy.
Soprano Victoria Lawal sang gorgeously as Mary Johnson, a close friend to both Hawkins and Timothy who sees and understands their situation. Kurt Winterhalter, Daniel Cilli, Elena Galván, Cara Gabrielson, Matthew Worth, and Matt Lovell all sang well in smaller roles.
