(Production photos by Keith Ian Polakoff)
By Richard S. Ginell
SAN PEDRO, Calif. – Anthony Davis has been on the firing line for politically-charged music theater works practically as long as the genre — once nicknamed CNN Opera – has been around. X, The Life And Times Of Malcolm X was his first back in 1986, and he has since dealt with subjects like Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army in Tania and the 1839 slave ship uprising in Amistad. He was good and ready to hit again at the issue of American racism with another opera, his eighth – this time aiming squarely at contemporary times with The Central Park Five.
Now, what company would be most likely to jump at the chance to give this incendiary piece its world premiere? Cue Long Beach Opera, which is large enough in spirit and daring to take on this project and small enough in budget not to care about the possible blowback in powerful circles. So Andreas Mitisek’s fearless outfit trouped into the aging Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro – a now-and-then landing spot for this gypsy-like company – on June 15 to let its patrons have a good, hard look at the nation’s justice system while taking an unflinching jab at the most powerful man on the planet.
To set the stage, The Central Park Five concerns an incident in New York City in 1989 where five teenagers, four black, and one Latino, ages 14 and 16, were rounded up and accused of raping and mutilating a 28-year-old woman jogging in Central Park (she survived the attack). Although all of them denied that they participated in the crime, and DNA tests did not match any of their bodies, the police coerced signed and videotaped confessions out of four of the five through physical and emotional intimidation. Ads in four New York newspapers taken out by a real estate mogul named Donald J. Trump called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, stirring up public opinion against them. The five were sentenced to prison but were exonerated in 2002 when an imprisoned serial rapist, Matias Reyes, confessed to the crime, and DNA tests confirmed it. (The same incident is dramatized in When They See Us, a Netflix miniseries that the streaming service says has set viewership records since its premiere on May 31.)
Richard Wesley’s libretto lays all of this out and more in straight-forward, easy-to-follow fashion – and LBO chief Mitisek’s stage direction was similarly and consistently on point. The sets were portable walls and doors rolling along the stage on casters, occasionally serving as screens for projected still images and headlines from the period.
At the cost of seeming out of step with current trends in texts and stage direction, it was refreshing to see a new opera operate this way. No nebulous, pretentious poetry. No mute doppelgängers onstage getting in the way. No jumping around back and forth on the time frame. No fantasies to distract from or refract the main thrust of the storyline.
Yes, the young(er) Trump of 30 years ago is a character in the opera, too, with the overlong red tie, hand movements, and jaw jutting out like Mussolini done to perfection and sung in an appropriately high, reedy tenor by Thomas Segen. In the opera’s most provocative scene at the start of Act II, one that drew laughter, Trump could be seen barking orders over the telephone while sitting on the toilet. All I can say is that this is not an opera for Republicans. (It should be noted that even as recently as 2016, Trump still maintained that the Central Park Five were guilty as charged.)
Davis’ score is one of his most absorbing and powerful yet. While a piece like Tania leans heavily toward jazz (Davis is also well known as a progressive jazz pianist) and Amistad leans the other way in favor of so-called classical contemporary music, The Central Park Five mixes both in an even, smoothly integrated way, with maybe a touch of Broadway in some of the ensembles for the Five. Electronic interludes waft in from the sound booth; other interludes from the pit band feature swinging brass riffs with string counterpoint, and the district attorney at the trial (Jessica Mamey) makes her case to a cool, sinister tango. There is some inside-baseball for jazz buffs: As the pit band led by Leslie Dunner plays some bluesy textures whose colors evoke Duke Ellington, suddenly one of the characters talks about Harlem as a black-and-tan fantasy. (Harlem and “Black and Tan Fantasy” are the titles of two Ellington compositions.)
One problem from previous operas that crops up here is that Davis’ writing for the solo voice is not as interesting as his writing for instruments – all recitative with an occasional ensemble, often disconnected from the sometimes busy goings-on in the pit. Also the individual personalities of the five suspects aren’t drawn very clearly. All are portrayed mainly as scared young boys with caring parents, not at all the “wilding” hoodlums of the tabloid headlines.
The Five are well cast with strong voices – Derrell Acon playing Antron McCray, Cedric Barry as Yusef Salaam, Orson Van Gay as Raymond Santana, Nathan Granner as Korey Wise, and Bernard Holcomb as Kevin Richardson. Zeffin Quinn Hollis registered forcefully in the role of The Masque, a white hipster who assumes multiple roles in the police department; his jacket is filled with hot-button words and his speech is a composite of white supremacist thought.
The opera ends when the boys are exonerated; they line up and sing an uplifting finale proclaiming that they are still here. Indeed, in real life, in 2014 the Five received a $41 million settlement from the city of New York (Trump fumed that the settlement was “a disgrace”), and most went on to raise families and perform good works with the money. But Mitisek leaves us with a disillusioning headline projected on a wall, a reminder that coerced confessions and racial profiling are by no means things of the past.
Long Beach Opera continues its run of The Central Park Five on June 22 and 23. (For information and tickets, go here.) After that, there are no definite plans for the production to travel, but Mitisek anticipates there will be interest. With Trump as a prominent character, that’s a fairly safe bet.
Richard S. Ginell writes regularly about music for the Los Angeles Times, and is the Los Angeles correspondent for American Record Guide and the West Coast regional editor for Classical Voice North America. He also contributes to San Francisco Classical Voice and Musical America.
