Boston Musical Intelligencer review: Fringe Festival’s Our Town
Boston Musical Intelligencer review: Fringe Festival’s Our Town
This review of BU’s production of Our Town was first published in The Boston Musical Intelligencer on October 31, 2022. By Matthew Winkler | Photos by Jacob Chang-Rascle
Excerpt
Boston University’s 26th annual Fringe Festival under the auspices of the BU Opera Institute and the School of Theatre, opened its second week this past Friday with Ned Rorem’s idiosyncratic opera Our Town in a run at the CFA Concert Hall. I attended on opening night. Rorem’s work teeters on a dangerous line. Setting Thornton Wilder’s American classic to music threatens to undermine the original play. For good reason, Wilder refused to allow his major plays to be set as operas in his lifetime, even at the requests of Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. With Our Town the emotional potency resides in the universality and relatability of the human experience. It is not about a New Hampshire small town, but rather life itself. Operatic drama threatens to bloat and overwhelm this relatability by corrupting the intimate connection between stage and audience. It is within this foggy contradiction of mediums that both composer and all future performers must grope.
From the outset a philosophical contradiction existed between Rorem and Wilder. Rorem views himself esthetically as French, and was heavily influenced by the group of composers known as Les Six, whereas Wilder claimed his work to be “German in emotion,” citing Bach and Beethoven as examples. To pair a composer who denounced the German esthetic as superficially profound, and an author whose overpowering reaction to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony drove him to finish The Bridge of San Luis Rey would seem to result in cacophony, but it is this antithesis that Rorem plays upon. Vocalist Marin Sewell, as the catch-all Mrs. Soames, married these two disparate esthetics the best, straddling the line between operatic camp and theatrical believability, while still delivering a belting, but vitally playful and easy-to-understand vocal performance.
Transporting a modest and unpretentious American town to the opera form, which is the antonym of modest and unpretentious, robs the characters of their personality. How can Emily Webb simultaneously be a timid girl and an opera diva? We get how that works in 19th -century grand opera, but in an intimate workshop production, we don’t expect that dichotomy. While other cast members, such as Marcus Huber as George Gibbs, enlivened their characters with commendable acting, Marin Sewell succeeded best in creating a convincing character while maintaining vocal virtuosity and understandable declamation. She retained the stereotypical small-town personality in spite of her breaking into diva song.
As an adaptation, Rorem’s opera works best in abstract ideas and moments of intense emotion. Transitions between acts are among the most compelling musical moments, as the music is perfectly suited to represent the movement of time and changing of tone. Act 1 ends with a simple and settled orchestral C major chord, serving as an apt bookend for heartwarming childhood. Act 2 then begins with a furious 12-tone line in the piano, both representing the sudden passing of time and the anxious excitement of the young marriage to come.
Fittingly, the Boston University Chamber Orchestra, conducted by William Lumpkin, played best during these transitions. Musical and narrative agreement is not only beneficial for the audience, but also allows for better performance. The orchestra, even at its reduced size and placed in the back, ran the risk of visually dwarfing the actors. To represent an unassuming small town, the schematic set, designed by Sarah Lloyd, consisted entirely of ordinary chairs and tables. Compared to the understated mise-en-scène, the 41-piece orchestra held the most visual splendor and grandiosity on stage, thereby potentially undermining the story. While lighting and scenery tried to draw attention away from the musicians, through shadows and three eye-catching lit images of the town, the size and stately manner of the orchestra still demanded our eyes. To rectify this, the characters knew of the orchestra’s existence. Frequently the stage manager, played by Andrew Bearden Bowen, gestured to the musicians or glibly interacted with the conductor. Rorem’s music additionally helped the pit realize its own in-world character. Alongside explicitly diegetic music, such as Wagner and Mendelssohn’s Wedding Marches, the orchestra lived and breathed, coming alive instrument by instrument following a resolution. The wise decision to include the orchestra in the world of the characters synthesized well with Wilder’s metatheatrical play.
Ned Rorem’s Our Town is an experiment, and perhaps not a wholly successful one. Even Rorem acknowledges in the score notes his uncertainty, writing, “Does it need to be sung? Am I the one to make it singable?” While it can musically stand alone as an opera, and occasionally enhances the narrative of the play, the intended impact of Our Town is still at its finest as Wilder’s original work. But Boston University’s Fringe Festival, 26 years in the running, deserves admiration for its continued commitment to championing new works and voices. After all, if no one performs non-canonical works, then how will anything new ever enter therein?
read the full review of our town
BU Opera Season
Each fall, BU puts on the annual Fringe Festival, which is a collaboration between CFA School of Music’s Opera Institute and School of Theatre. Fringe features new and rarely performed significant works in the opera and theatre repertoire, bringing performances and audiences together in unique theatrical settings.
And in the spring, two mainstage operas invite the BU community and beyond to experience the exceptional talent of the students in the program, within incredible productions supported by the School of Theatre.