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Chicago Opera Theater review: ‘Freedom Ride’ illuminates a battle for civil rights

Why did they do it?

Why did young men and women in the summer of 1961 climb onto buses and trains in the name of integration, whites sitting next to blacks in a Deep South that hated them for it?

They knew they would be greeted by clubs and bludgeons, that they’d end up in hospitals or prisons or worse. Yet the Freedom Riders, as they were known, would not be deterred, fighting for civil rights in the noblest way possible: by risking their own lives.

Their ordeals nearly have been forgotten by our popular culture, notwithstanding the national profile of former Freedom Rider and U.S. Representative John Lewis, D-Ga. But their struggle was stage center Saturday evening at the Studebaker Theater, where Chicago Opera Theater presented the world premiere of composer-librettist Dan Shore’s “Freedom Ride.” The opera, nine years in the making, sought not to re-imagine historic battles but to search for something more profound: what motivated these brave young souls to risk everything, despite violent opposition.

It did so through the fictional story of Sylvie Davenport, a college student drawn to the Freedom Riders not by social conscience but by romantic attraction to one of its charismatic leaders, Clayton Thomas. He lures impressionable young people to his cause in the opera’s extended opening scene, set on the quad of an unnamed historically black college in New Orleans.

In baritone Robert Sims’ portrayal, Thomas exuded both righteous indignation at pervasive racism and unyielding determination to fight it. Composer Shore gave the character long, heroic lines, as well as ample time in which to entice students gathered around him, none more smitten by his plea than the innocent Davenport (soprano Dara Rahming in a role originally to have featured Lauren Michelle, who left “for personal reasons,” according to a COT representative).

No sooner does Davenport express her interest in becoming a Freedom Rider than she’s confronted by her mother, Georgia (mezzo-soprano Zoie Reams), who’s horrified at what lies ahead and excoriates her in their turbulent, angry duet. Davenport’s troubles only deepen when Thomas rebuffs her romantic overtures, forcing her to acknowledge her true reasons for having toyed with becoming a Freedom Rider.

From this point forth, we see and hear Davenport struggling to decide a question that will determine her future: whether to get on board. Her search for the answer will be made more difficult by a church bombing in which many will be injured and a friend will die.

“Freedom Ride” achieves its deepest impact not via such twists of plot, however, but from its characters’ reactions to them. When the future Freedom Riders rehearse what a confrontation on a bus might be like, the opera shows us how deeply they suffer at the thought of encountering not only violence but humiliation. When the church bombing leads to a character’s death, the doomed Freedom Rider expresses neither sorrow nor hate in her last moments of life but faith in a higher power. When a Jewish character explains to his black comrades why he’s becoming a Freedom Rider, his aria subtly evokes his family’s tragic past in Europe – one reason, among many, that young people became Freedom Riders.

At its heart, “Freedom Ride” focuses on how and why Davenport makes her choice. Her evolution from naive student to hopeful protester proved compelling, thanks to the poetry of Shore’s score, which elegantly merged high-flown operatic melody with gospel-tinged ensemble writing. True, this music broke no new ground, but it clearly wasn’t designed to. Shore instead chose to revel in classical African American musical idioms – the very sounds that Freedom Riders in 1960s New Orleans would have encountered in church on any Sunday morning.

Nowhere was this verismo-meets-vernacular approach more powerful than in “I Been Tryin’ to Get to Jackson for Three Days,” a shattering train station aria in which a character named Leonie Baker decries the Freedom Riders. “I seen people die,” sang soprano Whitney Morrison, emotion rising with each phrase. “I seen my brother die. So why do I care where I sit on that bus?”

Composer Shore has structured the opera shrewdly, solos and duets alternating with large ensemble pieces, introspective soliloquies juxtaposed with throaty gospel exhortations. A long and majestic church sequence featured a heaven-storming sermon from Rev. Jerome Mitchell, sublimely paced and passionately sung by tenor Cornelius Johnson.

The work’s only structural flaw concerned a children’s choir scene. Though such angelic tones are impossible to resist, the sequence was dramatically extraneous, with little connection to the story’s progress.

Yet the original hymns and spirituals that composer Shore has written sound as if they could have been handed down through the ages. And “Tikkun Olam,” the aria sung by tenor Blake Friedman as the Jewish character Marc, drew upon Hebraic inflections without exaggerating them.

Soprano Rahming carried considerable responsibility as Davenport, expressing her character’s psychological anguish via a vocal performance that gained heft and ferocity as the evening unfolded. In a final triumphant sequence, the opera’s black-and-white costumery (designed by Harry Nadal) gave way to her bright, life-affirming orange dress, signaling a moment of arrival. Well done.

By conceiving a stripped-down production with minimal props, stage director Tazewell Thompson in effect focused attention on the score and the singing. The historic film footage that served as backdrop gave the production a real-world urgency. So did the staging of the church bombing scene, which conveyed confusion and terror amid so much shattering glass. Thompson moved his soloists and choir fluidly from one scene to the next, no easy task considering the number of people and settings involved.

Conductor and COT music director Lidiya Yankovskaya led the soloists, choirs and the Chicago Sinfonietta in a crisp performance that served populist and classical idioms with equal aplomb.

But the star was Shore’s music, which carried obvious influences of George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein and made the most of them.

It’s not difficult to envision a long future for “Freedom Ride,” which at 90 minutes would be quite manageable for a wide range of opera companies, especially student troupes that might inspire young new activists.

If so, Shore will have accomplished something significant.

3.5 stars

“Freedom Ride” plays at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 3 p.m. Feb. 16 at the Studebaker Theater, 410 S. Michigan Ave.; $45-$150; 312-704-8414 or www.chicagooperatheater.org.

Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.

hreich@chicagotribune.com