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mae
12-04-2012, 06:20 PM
http://www.kqed.org/news/story/2012/12/03/112104/sf_opera_premieres_stephen_king_story?category=bay +area

The San Francisco Opera will be celebrating its ninety-first season next year with some very familiar classics, including Puccini's Madame Butterfly, Verdi's La Traviata, and Rossini's The Barber of Seville. But the spotlight will likely fall on a work commissioned by the company-- the world premiere of Dolores Claiborne, based on the 1992 novel by Stephen King. Claiborne is not a supernatural tale, but a story of murder, sexual abuse and repressed memory involving three women.

Claiborne will bring the work of composer Tobias Picker and librettist J. D. McClatchy to the Bay Area for the first time. Dolora Zajick will play Dolores.

The San Francisco Opera will also present the company premiere of Show Boat by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein with Patricia Racette, Nathan Gunn, and Morris Robinson as Joe.

mae
08-17-2013, 09:10 AM
http://www.sacbee.com/2013/08/17/5654833/san-francisco-opera-brings-stephen.html

Among living authors, few offer as large a body of work as promising for adapting to opera as Stephen King, whose characters are well established in the public consciousness and embody a wide emotional scope.

This observation was realized years ago by composer Tobias Picker, who has earned a reputation for writing bracing operas with strong female roles. Adapting a King work for the operatic stage had been a simmering, decadelong desire for Picker, 59, an avowed fan of the best-selling writer.

When Picker finished his opera “An American Tragedy,” for New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2005, he decided the time was right to seriously start thinking about how to adapt King’s 1992 psychological thriller “Dolores Claiborne” to the grand opera stage.

He went looking for an opera company. His first stop was the San Francisco Opera, run by general director David Gockley, a friend of Picker’s from when he was composer-in-residence at the Houston Symphony and Gockley was the general director of the Houston Grand Opera.

“He and I had been talking about doing an opera together for a long time,” Picker said.

Gockley, a maverick commissioner of operas, loved the idea. It seemed like a perfect fit given the long list of commissions Gockley has overseen, including the 9/11 opera “Heart of a Soldier,” last year’s provocative adaptation of Melville’s “Moby Dick” and his most famous commission: John Adams’ “Nixon in China.”

Picker’s “Dolores Claiborne” gets its world premiere Sept. 18 at the War Memorial Opera House, with a libretto by J.D. McClatchy. The cast features noted mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick in the title role and soprano Elizabeth Futral as Vera. George Manahan conducts the James Robinson production.

Picker, who is known for the highly regarded operas “Emmeline” and “An American Tragedy,” was introduced to “Dolores Claiborne” through the underrated 1995 film starring Kathy Bates and directed by Taylor Hackford. The film adaptation stayed close to King’s novel, which is written like a continuous monologue by its title character.

“When I first saw the movie I wasn’t so sure it could be an opera, but when I read the book I realized it could,” he said. “It had all the bones.”

The novel tells the tale of Claiborne, who seeks to clear her name amid allegations that she killed her wealthy employer. In doing so, she confesses to the murder of her husband, which happened 30 years prior.

The 1992 book proved a hit with the public and became the biggest seller in the United States that year. For King it remains one of his few books in which the supernatural is not a driving factor. Nonetheless, it is still classic King fare — with characters confronting formidable pressures against the seemingly quaint and benign backdrop of a small New England town.

“I’m very drawn to strong, clearly defined characters who have intense and emotional inner lives and problems,” Picker said.

And if those characters are women, all the better. Picker has a talent for writing music for tragic female characters on harsh journeys. The title character of his 1996 opera “Emmeline,” adapted from a book by Judith Rossner, shares a similar fraught story arc with “Claiborne.” Both must transcend adversity by defying the claustrophobic societal expectations imposed on women, Picker said.

In “Emmeline” the title character gives birth to an illegitimate son who is soon taken away to be raised by others. Two decades later, she unknowingly marries him. After that secret is revealed, Emmeline is abandoned by her son/husband and ostracized in her town until her death.

Unlike “Emmeline,” the title character in “Dolores Claiborne” recounts, with a vivid potty mouth, a history of domestic violence and sexual abuse, and the dawning of powerful womanhood. It’s a role that demands a powerful presence on the screen and on the opera stage. As regards the film, Bates imbued the role with an outsized presence. She has said that “Dolores Claiborne” was one of her greatest roles.

In selecting Zajick for the title role, the production will see a talented soprano — and one who has made a mark with the Verdi repertoire. She is closely linked with the San Francisco Opera stemming from a stunning debut she made with the company as Azucena in 2003’s “Il Trovatore” and with her standout performance as Joan of Arc in the company’s 2006 production of Tchaikovsky’s “The Maid of Orleans.”

The almost larger-than-life aspect of “Claiborne” proved a welcome challenge to librettist McClatchy, who had previously worked with Picker on “Emmeline.” McClatchy said he embraced the job of adapting a work well known in the pop-culture consciousness.

“With a Stephen King novel you find a person in extreme situations — and I was drawn to the psychology of that, of how we cope, how we feel,” McClatchy said. “The realism of the book was very attractive to me.”

In crafting the libretto, he stayed close to the book and eschewed any close reading of the film adaptation.

McClatchy, a well-known poet who teaches at Yale and has written several librettos, said he first went through the text to get a sense of the characters.

As a librettist, McClatchy said his primary job is to stay out of the way of the composer. It was a lesson he learned the hard way upon taking his first libretto job in 1998: “A Question of Taste” for composer William Schuman. When he handed in his first draft, Schumann rejected it. In retrospect, McClatchy sees that first draft as having done everything but getting out of the way of Schuman.

“It was a very good lesson,” he said. “My job in writing a libretto is to make the composer want to write music. That is very different from, say, writing a play version of a novel.”

The novel presented McClatchy certain hurdles, including having Claiborne alternate between singing as a young and old woman in the same act.

“It’s a plot that keeps doubling back — from 1940 to 1992. There are time changes, which is a challenge.”

And as is the case with many King novels, a sense of place is a big factor in the story. “Claiborne” is set in the windswept fictional island town of Little Tall Island — the same island used as the setting for King’s 1999 “Storm of the Century,” a miniseries he wrote specifically for television.

“This is, for the most part, a raw landscape with raw personalities in it,” McClatchy said. “This is an emotional landscape as well as a physical one, and I tried to reflect that in the libretto.”

For Picker, this will be the second opera with a Maine setting. “Emmeline” was set in the inland town of Fayette. Picker describes the feeling of the opera’s music as being an interplay of darkness and light.

“It’s passionate and emotional music. Sometimes it’s very dark, at times it’s funny,” Picker said.

The levity breaks the shadowy mood in two party scenes.

“I have to thank Gilbert and Sullivan for that,” said Picker.

Nonetheless, it is a work seamed with tragedy, as befits King.

“It’s grand opera, and it’s quite dark,” Picker said.

Dolores Claiborne San Francisco Opera

When: 7:30 p.m., Sept. 18 and 25; 2 p.m. Sept. 22; 8 p.m., Sept. 28 and Oct. 1 and 4.

Where: War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco

Tickets: $26-$285

Information: (415) 864-3330; www.sfopera.com

Bryant Burnette
08-17-2013, 04:41 PM
I'm not much of a fan of opera, but this sounds cool. I hope there'll be a CD release.

mae
09-27-2013, 07:43 AM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B1h4sHHQ64

Randall Flagg
10-02-2013, 06:20 AM
I really wanted to see this, but the least expensive tickets are $67, and go up to $357 each. Ouch!

jhanic
10-03-2013, 04:05 AM
It doesn't sound like you missed much:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303464504579109222256132540.html?m od=WSJ_LifeStyle_LifestyleArtEnt


In 1996, I attended the world premiere of Tobias Picker's first opera, "Emmeline," at the Santa Fe Opera. I have never forgotten the electricity of that piece, with its swift, inexorable descent into disaster, its felicitous melding of words and music, its heart-tugging tragic heroine seduced into accidental incest. It wasn't only me—the entire audience seemed galvanized.

None of Mr. Picker's three subsequent stage pieces has had that hurricane force, but I wondered if his fifth opera, "Dolores Claiborne," now in its premiere run at the San Francisco Opera, might. Not only is it based on a dark 1992 novel by Stephen King, but the project also reunited Mr. Picker with the librettist of "Emmeline," J.D. McClatchy; its leading lady, Patricia Racette; and its conductor, George Manahan. Alas, despite faint echoes of that first opera's energy, "Dolores" is flat and predictable.

Mr. King's novel is a monologue: We hear the voice of the tough, foul-mouthed Dolores, who is in a police station on a tiny island off the coast of Maine, accused of murdering the wealthy Vera, whom she served for decades, first as a housekeeper and later, after Vera had a stroke, as her live-in caretaker. (As it turns out, she didn't do it.) The story unfolds in flashbacks, gradually revealing Dolores's history. Years earlier, she had killed her brutal husband, Joe, when she discovered that he was sexually abusing their daughter, Selena. Her love-hate relationship with the impossibly exigent Vera is anchored in Vera's timely hint about how to deal with Joe, and their shared philosophy, "Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto."

It's a grim, Gothic tale, and Mr. McClatchy's streamlined, poetic libretto follows the arc of the novel, building tension about the isolated, embattled women who feel forced to do terrible deeds. "God don't have time to forgive women," Dolores says as she plots Joe's demise. "He's too busy with men." Dolores, Vera and the lonely, unhappy adult Selena, who is estranged from her mother, even sing the "bitch" line as a trio in Act II.

But for all the tough talk, the music tells a different, less compelling story. There are a few fierce scenes, like the moment when Dolores confronts the young Selena on the ferry and forces her to reveal her secret, and the chilling quartet that closes Act I, as Joe fondles Selena and Vera suggests a violent solution to Dolores. However, for the most part, Mr. Picker's music softens the edges of Dolores and the tale. We get too much of Dolores's inner pain and humanity as opposed to her granitic stoicism and ferocious determination to protect those she loves. The vocal writing is pretty rather than strong, sapping the purely visceral power of the story, and the scenes tend to linger rather than move.

Mr. Picker revisits elements that made "Emmeline" so gripping. Some of the music even sounds familiar: The buoyant quintet for Vera's put-upon maids, with its chugging orchestration, sounds like "Plates to the kitchen, hearts to heaven," sung by the mill girls in "Emmeline." An aria about stars for Selena, about the solar eclipse during which Joe's murder takes place, recalls the "weaving the dark" aria in "Emmeline." But neither passage feels as thematically or theatrically integrated as those in the earlier opera.

San Francisco has given "Dolores" a top-flight cast and production. The title role was originally written for the mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick, who withdrew during the rehearsal period; Ms. Racette, who was in San Francisco rehearsing for Arrigo Boito's "Mephistopheles," stepped in. She gave an impassioned vocal performance, but the fact that she is a soprano helped make her characterization less weighty than it needs to be. Also, Ms. Racette projects vulnerability; you don't quite believe her in lines like "I did not kill that bitch."

A lower voice would also have balanced the trio of female protagonists differently, since the two others are high sopranos. Elizabeth Futral brought imperiousness and humor to the role of Vera. Mr. Picker even inserted a little musical joke: Her advice to Dolores, "Accidents can be an unhappy woman's best friend," had the tune of the Forest Bird in "Siegfried." As Selena, a frightened teen and then a bitter adult lawyer, Susannah Biller soared even higher, up to D-flat.

The male characters were aggressive antagonists: Bass-baritone Wayne Tigges brought an evil swagger to Joe, mixing brutality and self-pity in equal measure. As Detective Thibodeau, tenor Greg Fedderly harangued Dolores to confess in a very high register; Joel Sorenson was suitably milquetoast as the bank manager who lets Joe steal Dolores's hard-earned savings. Mr. Manahan conducted with clarity.

Director James Robinson's production supplied a vivid, supple frame for the action. Allen Moyer's sets and Christopher Akerlind's lighting effectively carried off the opera's swift, cinematic scene changes and switches between past and present. With Greg Emetaz's projections and James Schuette's costumes, they evoked the different worlds of the island, from Vera's grand house to Dolores's working-class cottage.
***

The next afternoon, Ms. Racette turned in a sumptuous, heart-rending performance as Margherita in Boito's "Mephistopheles," matched by the ardent tenor of Ramón Vargas as Faust and the devilish high jinks of Ildar Abdrazakov in the title role. San Francisco has resurrected the iconic Robert Carsen production, which bowed in Geneva in 1988 and traveled the world; this revival, directed by Laurie Feldman, is also headed for the Met, where it was last seen in 1999-2000. The show is a hoot. Michael Levine's designs—from heaven as a 19th-century opera house full of crowned, masked angels to a witches' sabbath of cavorting demons wearing party hats and very little else—match the eccentricity of this peculiar but entertaining version of Goethe's "Faust." Conductor Nicola Luisotti paced the performance with deliberate grandeur, and the chorus of 90, augmented by 30 children, looked and sounded sensational.

John

mae
08-21-2017, 11:17 AM
http://www.playbill.com/article/stephen-king-opera-joins-59e59-theaters-fall-lineup

59E59 Theaters has announced its complete fall lineup. Joining the previously announced world premiere of Kait Kerrigan and Brian Lowdermilk’s new musical The Mad Ones, will be Dolores Clairborne (Tobias Picker’s opera adaptation of the bestselling Stephen King thriller) and a new production of David Harrower’s Knives in Hens.

Harrower’s 1995 play about the quest for freedom in a preindustrial rural world, Knives in Hens, will kick off the season October 19 in a production from The Shop. Taul Takacs will direct a cast that includes Robyn Kerr and Alvin Keith for a run scheduled to play through November 12.

From October 20 through November 5, 59E59 will present Nancy Bannon and Mollye Maxner’s Occupied Territories, directed by Maxner and starring Bannon, Kelley Rae O’Donnell, Cody Robinson, Done Bonner, Diego Aguirre, Thony Mena, Nile Harris, and Nathan Jan Yaffe. The play transports the audience from a suburban basement—where a woman digs through her estranged father’s past—to the jungles of Vietnam during the war. Occupied Territories is produced by Theater Alliance of Washington, DC in association with Available Potential Enterprises.

Also slated for October will be New York City Opera’s production of Dolores Claireborne, adapted by Picker with a libretto by J. D. McClatchy. Michael Cpasso will direct, with Pacian Mazzagatti tapped to conduct. A cast will be announced at a later date; performances will run October 22–29.

ur2ndbiggestfan
08-22-2017, 05:51 AM
As Groucho Marx said to the driver, "Is the opera over yet?" "No Sir." "Then let's go around the block one more time."

I know - badly misquoted.

DoctorZaius
01-27-2019, 12:22 PM
It's back, and coming to Boston in February! I am so hoping to attend.

http://tobiaspicker.com/tobias-pickers-dolores-claiborne-at-the-boston-university-opera-institute/

DoctorZaius
02-25-2019, 07:09 PM
Well, my wife took me to the opera on Saturday evening in Boston. A surreal experience to say the least. This was done by the Boston University graduate opera program - advanced students. Can't beat the $15 ticket price. Can't say that I loved it, but it was an experience I am glad to have had.
http://www.thedarktower.org/gallery/data/500/medium/Booth.jpeg

Ari_Racing
02-26-2019, 05:20 PM
For sure I'd love to see it. Congrats!