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Critic’s Notebook

Forced Out By Flooding, Houston’s Opera Gets On With the Show

Albina Shagimuratova singing in “La Traviata” at Houston Grand Opera’s makeshift theater in the George R. Brown Convention Center.Credit...Michael Stravato for The New York Times

HOUSTON — The big sets had to be jettisoned. The shadow-play in the production was overhauled. The conductor was forced to lead with her back to the singers. But the show went on.

Friday evening brought the sixth game of the Yankees-Astros playoff series to Minute Maid Park here. And a block from the stadium, Houston Grand Opera, forced out of its home in the Wortham Theater Center by ruinous flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey, opened its season with Verdi’s “La Traviata” in an unlikely makeshift auditorium: Exhibit Hall A3, renamed the HGO Resilience Theater, in the George R. Brown Convention Center.

Residents of a city ravaged by Harvey less than two months ago need all the diversion they can get, and Houstonians had a hard choice over the weekend. Mayor Sylvester Turner opted for “Traviata” on Friday, and his appearance beforehand drew a raucous ovation.

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“La Traviata” at the Brown Convention Center.Credit...Michael Stravato for The New York Times

“I chose to pass up being at the stadium tonight,” he told the audience. “The Astros will do their business and be back to play again.”

As New Yorkers know too well, he was right. Now the team will continue to disrupt Houston’s already disrupted opera season through the World Series.

Harvey swept into Houston on Aug. 25 and stayed for days, causing at least 60 deaths and delivering 50 inches of rain and untold devastation. The numbers are staggering. By current estimates, the damages to Texas, mostly this city, could reach $180 billion.

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Houston Grand Opera’s artistic and music director, Patrick Summers, left, and managing director Perryn Leech.Credit...Michael Stravato for The New York Times

The Wortham Theater Center, home to Houston Grand Opera and Houston Ballet, was flooded not only in the basement, where its mechanical and electrical fixtures reside, but also in its main auditorium, the Brown Theater, up to and beyond its stage level.

“A lot of water came in,” Perryn Leech, the opera company’s managing director, said flatly with exquisite understatement. Hundreds of millions of gallons surged through the loading docks at the Wortham, easily overcoming a retaining wall built in response to flooding from Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, and filled an underground parking lot, the basement and parts of the auditoriums.

The building is now festooned with air-conditioning ducts to dry it out, a process that is expected to take another month. Both Brown Theater and the smaller Cullen Theater will be closed at least until May, essentially the whole season.

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A sound-reflecting hanging wall behind the orchestra.Credit...Michael Stravato for The New York Times

After a quick search, Houston Grand Opera gained access to the large exhibit hall in the convention center, shortly after the 10,000 evacuees sheltered there had left the building. (The convention center, the Wortham and Jones Hall, the home of the Houston Symphony, are all owned by the city and administered by a corporation called Houston First.) Then the opera’s technical crew created an auditorium space with 1,700 seats (Brown Theater has 2,200), dressing rooms and a lobby, using tall, heavy curtains.

There are, however, no fly space to hang big sets, no orchestra pit and no sound-reflecting wall. “We knew it would be a compromise,” said Patrick Summers, the company’s artistic and music director.

For “Traviata,” in a production by Arin Arbus previously mounted at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Canadian Opera Company, the large sets had to be abandoned and the staging, which originally relied heavily on shadow-play, largely revamped.

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The audience at the dress rehearsal for “La Traviata.”Credit...Michael Stravato for The New York Times

Ms. Arbus seemed to take it all in stride. “It is always true that you have to roll with the punches,” she said. “Maybe there were more punches than usual, but every collaboration is in the moment, in this case with 175 people.”

The orchestra had to be shunted behind the stage, with the conductor facing away from the singers. Under these circumstances, a major star of “La Traviata” was Eun Sun Kim, a young Korean conductor making her North American debut, who led the performance with great sensitivity and flexibility as another conductor, Peter Pasztor, relayed her beat in front of the stage for crowd scenes.

This notion of leading with your back to the stage “goes totally against everything you’re trying to do,” said Mr. Summers, a veteran maestro who will himself conduct from the harpsichord in the imminent production of Handel’s “Julius Caesar,” which was in rehearsal on Thursday and Saturday. For all that, Ms. Kim did the job beautifully.

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Musicians arrive at the convention center.Credit...Michael Stravato for The New York Times

Still, the greatest curiosity attached to the voices and how they would fare in the compromised acoustics. Albina Shagimuratova, as Violetta, sounded very fine indeed, with alluring tone and admirable clarity and accuracy. Her male partners — Dimitri Pittas, as Alfredo, and George Petean, as Giorgio Germont, in his company debut — produced plenty of sonority but were slightly less reliable in pitch.

The revival of “Julius Caesar” (“Giulio Cesare,” sung in Italian but played in a 1920s Hollywood setting), will tell further tales. It features a stellar cast, led by Anthony Roth Costanzo as Caesar, Heidi Stober as Cleopatra and Stephanie Blythe as Cornelia. Unlike the large-scale “Traviata,” which came with its own raked wooden stage, “Caesar” is a smaller production, to be acted on the bare concrete floor. After tests last week, it was decided that judicious amplification would be needed to give the voices sufficient heft.

The Houston Symphony, heard on Saturday, required much less experimentation in its return to Jones Hall, undoubtedly to the relief of all. The orchestra, which lost much of its music library to flooding from Tropical Storm Allison, including scores marked and annotated by many maestros over the decades, has since raised the library four stories. Harvey affected offices and communications, but nothing directly related to performances.

Matthew Halls conducted elegant performances of symphonies by Schubert (No. 5) and Mozart (No. 41), with just the slightest bit of rust in the playing. And Johannes Moser gave a commanding, sometimes playful account of Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C — the opening theme of Schumann’s Cello Concerto just happened to drop by in a cadenza – and added the Allemande from Bach’s First Cello Suite as a lovely encore.

Hurricane damages, it should be noted, have not been confined to institutions but have also acutely burdened individuals. Both the Houston Grand Opera and the Houston Symphony have set up relief funds for staff members and musicians who lost homes, cars or other assets.

The opera has collected $175,000 — $100,000 to defray the company’s losses and $65,000 to go to 12 members who have applied for assistance. The symphony has raised more than $100,000 to be distributed to 17 afflicted staff members and players. The current catchphrase for what Mayor Turner called this “can-do city” — “Houston Strong” — evidently applies to more than just baseball.

Houston Grand Opera
“La Traviata runs until Nov. 11 and “Julius Caesar” from Oct. 27 to Nov. 10 at the HGO Resilience Theater, George R. Brown Convention Center; houstongrandopera.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: After the Deluge, Going On With the Show. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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