Complications in Sue. Opera Philadelphia. BCM+D Records B0069-26. Total Time: 125:00.
DIGITAL REVIEW — Anyone listening to the live recording of Opera Philadelphia’s world premiere of Complications in Sue, with a libretto by Michael R. Jackson based on an idea by Justin Vivian Bond and a score by 10 composers, will have a FOMO moment: The fear of missing out is real.
This album captures not only the performance but also the audience reactions, from the full gamut of belly laughs to the vocal applause. The late musical theatre master Stephen Sondheim once said that when creating a work, you have to leave room for the audience response, believing that any musical theatre piece needed less input by the creators than they realize. Even for an armchair listener, FOMO sets in during this recording.
Complications in Sue is an 85-minute, one-act, English-language opera commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and premiered in February 2026. It is deliberately constructed as an experiment: The 10 scenes cover Sue’s life from birth to age 99, while the 10 composers each wrote one roughly eight-minute scene without seeing the others’ music.
The project originated with Bond’s earlier idea involving the actress Tilda Swinton: The two had contemplated sharing the role of a woman named Sue. Anthony Roth Costanzo, general director and president of Opera Philadelphia, and a friend of Bond, eventually commissioned it for the company’s 50th-anniversary season, with Bond in the title role.
It is reported that an unusually short development period helped determine the form. Rather than ask one composer to produce a full-length score on a compressed schedule, Costanzo and Jackson divided the work into 10 scenes, each corresponding to a decade of Sue’s life, and brought in the composers Errollyn Wallen, Missy Mazzoli, Andy Akiho, Nathalie Joachim, Dan Schlosberg, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Alistair Coleman, Kamala Sankaram, Rene Orth, and Nico Muhly. Uncannily, the stylistic and orchestration choices, bar Muhly and Akiho’s contributions, are remarkably consistent. Overall, there is an element of humor and lightness missing in the orchestration. It’s all heavily brassy and rich, making the singers’ roles just that much more difficult.
There are some standouts: Wallen’s furtive opening summoning the birth of Sue, Muhly’s distant evocation of the death of Sue, Joachim’s lyrical aria in the scene for “Susan’s Imagination,” Schlosberg’s at once muscular, then frothy, burlesque approach to Scene Five’s “Sue Ex-husband,” and Akiho’s clever, rhythmic, and staccato approach to the arguably most challenging libretto vignette: How many times can we hear the line “Who is Sue”? Yes, we got it the first time.
On paper — given the novel approach to the creative process — this opera has very little likelihood of flourishing. What makes it oddly successful is the caliber of the creative team and the stellar cast — a constellation of multiple Pulitzer Prize winners, MacArthur Fellows, and Grammy-nominated artists. The singers — all taking on a number of different roles — are soprano Kiera Duffy, mezzo-soprano Imara Miles, tenor Nicky Spence, and bass-baritone Nicholas Newton. Duffy’s lustrous shimmer rising above the sturdiest of orchestras, Miles’ warm voice, Spence’s clarion, and Newton’s operatic drama sealed the success.
Jackson’s libretto — his first foray into the opera world — is divided into monologues that embody characters who, for one reason or another, inhabit Sue’s life. In addition to the real-life personas — such as the Child Self, a neighbor, and the octogenarians — Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus, Algorithms, and Death itself make appearances, and this is where surrealism comes in. Dreams, chance, accidents, humor, absurdity, disruptions of time and space, eroticism, liberation, and desire are all juxtaposed, unexpectedly collide, and are utterly unconventional.
The upside of this live stage recording is that the producers and engineers are able to catch the electricity of the performance. But despite it all, there is still a very heavy sense of FOMO.
