To me, “dramedy” sounds like a safe slot on the shelf for works that aren’t funny enough to be called a comedy or emotionally engaging enough to be dramas.
But that’s not a bad description of “Flight,” a 1998 opera currently receiving its first Twin Cities production courtesy of Minnesota Opera. It’s a work that left me wondering if composer Jonathan Dove and librettist April De Angelis sought to blow out the boundaries on either end of the “dramedy” scale. For “Flight” is full of whiplash-inducing mood swings, emotions peaking and plummeting rapidly, comic hijinks and tragedy pressed up against one another.
It also has an interesting score with fine moments for several singers and the orchestra. And Minnesota Opera’s staging is skillfully constructed. But “Flight” has a frustratingly unfocused libretto in which five separate stories intersect in an airport terminal, none of them particularly captivating. And Dove’s music often bears such a histrionic tone that even the simplest of exchanges can sound like it carries Grave Import.
Dove and De Angelis started with the true story of a refugee who lived at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 years, which later inspired the Steven Spielberg film “The Terminal.” As he panhandles and hunts for food, our unnamed refugee becomes a curiosity to others at the airport: A couple looking to revive their marriage with a vacation, another relocating and expecting a child, a middle-aged woman seeking to rekindle a fling with a younger man, two randy flight attendants constantly seeking their next tryst, and a character called the “Controller,” who might be the personification of the airport itself.
That last character may inspire you to consider if “Flight” is intended as surrealism. But so many characters sing of the mundane details of their lives that it feels as if we’re firmly grounded. And so are the passengers, for a storm blows in and leaves them looking for ways to kill time during an extended delay. If that sounds not particularly entertaining to you, well, you’ll likely find agreement from the patrons in my row, which emptied out at intermission.
Yet here’s a note to those absent folks: It actually turned into a completely different opera in Act Three. It was transformed into a farce, employing every English comedy cliché from missing trousers to unconscious people hidden in trunks to panicked dithering as a child is born. It seemed so incongruous to all that had come before it that the creators seemed to be tossing out ideas and hoping that something would gain traction. When things inevitably turned tragic again, I was left wondering if perhaps Dove and De Angelis intended things to be this enigmatic and confounding.
There are 10 singing roles in “Flight,” and they’re almost all pitched in the tenor range and higher. This left me thirsting for some tonal contrast beyond the frequent bursts of menace from the basses and low brass in the ample orchestra, which interpreted Dove’s score admirably under Geoffrey McDonald’s direction.
But there are scenes in which the singers truly shine, as when Katrina Galka’s soprano voice soars into the stratosphere as the Controller sings of the pleasures of an empty airport. Or when countertenor Cortez Mitchell is at last allowed to unveil how his purgatorial plight began. And mezzo Deanne Meek is admirable as the conflicted, agitated woman waiting for her absent lover.
Mark me down as an admirer of Minnesota Opera’s commitment to introducing audiences to contemporary works, rather than relying upon the same old same old to sell tickets. But “Flight” may be the least satisfying of the new operas the company’s presented over the past couple decades.
Minnesota Opera’s “Flight”
- When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday
- Where: Ordway Music Theater, 345 Washington St., St. Paul
- Tickets: $215-$25, available at 612-333-6669 or mnopera.org
- Capsule: An often confounding clash of comedy and tragedy.
