During a week in which Americans are being confronted anew with the idea that our economic and educational systems are “fixed” in favor of affluent white people, it’s appropriate that Minnesota Opera should premiere a new opera called “The Fix.” It’s a tale of corruption, but not among the wealthy and powerful.
No, the corrupted in this case are major league ballplayers, the members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox who deliberately lost the World Series in order to secure a much larger payout from gamblers than they’d receive for winning the championship. Before you say, “Well, aren’t major league ballplayers wealthy and powerful?” it’s best not to confuse 1919 with 2019. Playing baseball was a working-class profession back then, albeit a high-profile one. So some of the players saw throwing the series as a way of sticking it to a skinflint owner.
If you’re inclined to think that sounds like it has the potential to be a good opera, I agree. But, having caught opening night of “The Fix” at the Ordway Music Theater Saturday night, I can say this isn’t that opera. While composer Joel Puckett makes interesting use of the orchestra and has a cinematic flair for swells and surges of emotion, it’s easy to tell that this is his first opera, for he rarely puts his best melodies into the mouths of the singers. And librettist Eric Simonson seems indecisive about whether to have this opera be about real human frailty or something mythically American and bigger than us all.
Yet I can’t fault Simonson’s efforts as director of the production. It’s exceptionally well executed, with most of the performers doing all they can with the characters and Puckett’s not terribly tuneful arias and duets. And Walt Spangler’s set design is quite interesting, placing all of the action beneath a massive grandstand on which mannequins sit, presumably watching a game.
Alas, Puckett seems more intent upon summoning up atmosphere than telling a story in song. This handicaps the opera when menacing music rumbles beneath key exchanges — telegraphing that there’s villainy afoot and dispensing with a good hunk of the complexity — and having too much exposition delivered via musically repetitious recitatives. Perhaps the composer’s intent was to convey the characters’ conflicted inner lives, but the emotion all seems sequestered in the pit, where conductor Timothy Myers and the orchestra do fine things with the music.
Clear influences emerge in the score, echoing Stravinsky when things get propulsive, Philip Glass when wavering about between two or three chords, Aaron Copland when expansively epic, and Charles Ives in a recurring fractured take on “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Yet I never felt as if I were experiencing a composer with a voice all his own.
While the music makes it a challenge to engage with the characters, some succeed quite admirably. Tenor Joshua Dennis impressively summons to the surface “Shoeless” Joe Jackson’s conflicted conscience, while Andrew Wilkowske paints the most vivid character onstage as the gambler who launches the scheme. And Wei Wu uses his powerful bass voice to lend heft to the nastiness of ringleader “Chick” Gandil (who was born in St. Paul, by the way).
While I love the commitment to creating new work that Minnesota Opera has shown through its New Works Initiative, it frustrates me that each new piece it commissions was first a film. It feels as if the company is uncertain of anything that Hollywood didn’t tackle first. In this case, John Sayles made a very good film called “Eight Men Out” about the Black Sox scandal that I feel told this story much better than “The Fix.” While this opera isn’t based upon the film, it could use some of its nuanced humanity.
If You Go
- What: Minnesota Opera’s “The Fix”
- When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday
- Where: Ordway Music Theater, 345 Washington St., St. Paul
- Tickets: $200-$25, available at 612-333-6669 or mnopera.org
- Capsule: A tale of corruption that doesn’t make good contact.
