“Great Scott” is an opera about every beastly thing about opera, so it is possible the work’s inventors meant to create a beast. If so, they have succeeded.
Composer Jake Heggie and librettist Terrence McNally use the show to spoof the art form’s excesses and egos, and freely indulge their own. They turn out a tale of divas and divos, great composers and wannabes, love and insanity, art and death, and football, which may be their biggest mistake.
It seems, in this tall, Texas tale, that the resurrection of 19th century composer Vittorio Bazzetti’s long-lost “Rosa Dolorosa” is about to premiere on the same night as the Super Bowl, and the local Grizzlies have made it to the big game. Oh no. It’s a trail of tribulations for the famous American mezzo Arden Scott (sung by Joyce DiDonato) who has returned to her hometown American Opera Company to stage the discovery. Will anyone show up to hear it?
More importantly, will she rekindle her high-school romance with architect Sid Taylor ( Nathan Gunn) and leave her career behind?
Less importantly, will the conductor and the stage manager hook up, will the tenor take his shirt off, will the ruthlessly ambitious soprano steal Arden’s spotlight and maybe her career?
Screwball comedy, romance, melodrama — Hollywood used to make movies like this all the time, although, generally speaking, one at a time, and the formula feels familiar. Take him-and-her superstars, team them with the top writers of the day, hand the whole thing over to a director who knows how to shape a hit (here, that is veteran Jack O’Brien).
But the Dallas Opera, which premiered this effort Friday night, isn’t MGM in the 1950s. It aims higher and routinely succeeds at making things deeper than the kind of fluff that might star Lana Turner or Lucille Ball; material that doesn’t mine old rubes, like puffy tenors and sopranos hurling themselves off cliffs, or new rubes, like wardrobe malfunctions that expose a performer’s butt. The jokes can be funny — Tony-winning Terrence McNally funny — but we see most of them coming.
As for the plot, it threatens to get deep, and then fumbles the ball. Things come to a dramatic point in the endless, mandatory mad scene in the second act, where Scott is visited by the ghost of Vittorio Bazzetti himself. He lectures about how the art form is bigger then the people who put it on stage and a soprano’s job is to serve her musical master. Great works endure but voices are lost to time, he goes on.
Well, not in 2015, and operas fans know well that no one really dies anymore. They can watch Beverly Sills on YouTube 24/7, or download the remastered Maria Callas recordings that just came out and sound better than the originals. They can “like” Luciano Pavarotti’s Facebook page.
When they do, it becomes clear how composer-centered this anti-opera point is: It’s the music that’s dead without the singers. Operas only exist in that moment when a human being breathes in air and breathes out those high notes. The whole exercise is self-defeating for a work that struggles desperately to be contemporary with characters tweeting and skateboarding, their cell phones going off at inappropriate moments.
Scott gets thin choices over whether to sing on or stop. She’s beloved by the masses but can’t find true love. Her plan B, the architect, is a small-town bore. Neither option is better than flinging yourself off a cliff so what’s the point? DiDonato brings verve to the role; she’s super charming, but pushed too hard vocally, not enough dramatically.
Heggie’s music is adroit and complicated, swinging back and forth between the opera we are watching and the 1835 opera within it, between the Sondheim-influenced present and the Rossini-dominated past. He has versatile skills and it’s great to see the man who gave us “Dead Man Walking” and “Moby-Dick,” have some fun.
He challenges his singers, burying them in boatloads of bel canto. Characters blurt out extravagant trills and roars just in passing or, in one scene, the entire length of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” The fake masterpiece by the fictional Bazzetti is supposed to be ridiculous — Donizetti plus Bellini plus some Strauss and Wagner, all on steroids — so he recreates every vocal trick ever imagined.
This works, for the most part, but he can be on shaky ground. Imitation is flattering, unless it’s one of those bad Jack Nicholson imitations people do when they’re drunk. Still, Heggie’s confidence is endearing. The places where he nails the parody are the best thing about “Great Scott.”
There are other good things: A strong role for a countertenor, which Anthony Roth Costanzo handles fearlessly, and a meaningful overture, something new works often eschew. The orchestra in Dallas, under Patrick Summers, played like it was grateful to have the material. Ailyn Pérez, as the scheming second soprano, actually does end up stealing the show.
Set designer Bob Crowley has a few spectacular moments. The fictional opera is played toward backstage, with the singers facing away from the real audience and performing to an imaginary one in the opposite direction. The bright stage lights are blinding and we really do feel the pressure of delivering the goods in a big house.
And, yes, it can be a hoot. “Rosa Dolorosa” is subtitled “The Daughter of Pompei” which isn’t a good lineage for anyone brag on. The plot calls for Rosa to hurl herself into Mount Vesuvius as a human sacrifice meant to keep the volcano form erupting, thereby saving Pompei from ruin. We all know how well that worked out.
There are so many keen, insider jokes about opera that your enjoyment depends on how much you know about it, or care about its makers. If you get worked up over how stage managers are taken for granted or how rude critics can be, or how a successful career disrupts a singer’s social life, this is the opera for you.
You wait long for those laughs to lead to something more important, like Heggie and McNally did with their ” Dead Man Walking,” but both words and music veer off in too many directions. The piece wants to make a point about the state of opera, about how it tries too hard to stay relevant, but its own shameless mugging transforms it into the same target.
There’s a thin moment near the end when one supporting player, the great Frederica von Stade, proclaims “American Opera is here to stay,” though “Great Scott” has already argued otherwise and she sounds silly making such an obvious declaration.
Plus, enough with all this talk about opera’s constant battle against irrelevancy. This opera, its creators, and any customer who paid $100-plus understand fully the power and vibrancy of today’s opera or they would not have taken part in such a grand effort. Anybody inside opera knows it’s doing just fine; audiences are in flux, but the show goes on, and it’s so good so often.
Opera has always experimented, moved forward. All those whines about finances are really just part of the American nonprofit fundraising scheme; I’m not saying that’s a bad strategy, just that it’s a strategy and kind of depressing for the rest of us when folks go on like the world is ending, or that anyone actually believes that.
Today’s composers, librettists, singers, stage managers — they’re just making art, doing their jobs and, more often than not, succeeding.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or @rayrinaldi
