A report for slippedisc.com by Susan Hall:
Yuval Sharon and the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) represent the future of opera. Their opening-night production signals a bold new direction for a grand institution long in need of reinvention.
We’re in the David Koch Theater—but not in the seats. We’re onstage. It recalls the BAM production of The Loser, where baritone Rod Gilfry stood on a riser singing up close while pianist Conrad Tao, as Glenn Gould, played from the back of the stage to an empty orchestra. That was intimate. This is enveloping.
Here, two sets—mounted back-to-back on a constantly rotating turntable—loom before us. We’re caught somewhere between a merry-go-round and a motion picture, an ideal vantage point from which to be swept into the drama.
Two narratives unfold. One is based on Monteverdi’s final opera, L’incoronazione di Poppea. The other, The Comet, is a new work by composer George Lewis, loosely inspired by a short story by W.E.B. Du Bois. In that story, a man named John enters an opera house and becomes mesmerized by Lohengrin. A former white childhood playmate, now seated beside him, demands he be removed. An usher refunds his five dollars,maintaining opera’s supposed purity—elitist and exclusionary.
Lewis substitutes Monteverdi for Wagner, and the pairing works. The two operas unfold separately—until they begin, gradually and almost imperceptibly, to entwine.
In The Comet, John becomes Jim, sung magnificently by Davóne Tines. The Met once refused to cast Tines, offended by his social media posts calling the company racist. But his voice—and his presence—are too powerful to ignore. He channels Paul Robeson, unflinchingly.
Tines’s Jim Davis stands in what looks like a posh restaurant, perhaps in the old World Trade Center. A comet strikes. Bodies are sprawled across tables and floors. Composer Lewis weaves together classical timbres, jazz, even a bass flute solo. He’s developed a computer program that improvises with the orchestra, and electronics pulse beneath this score.
Keira Duffy’s character may have lost her father and sister in the explosion. Later, her father (or
a vision of him) returns, sung by Anthony Roth Costanzo, who delivers tender lines from beneath a tall stovepipe hat. Costanzo also appears as Nero in the Monteverdi opera, his silvery countertenor floating over the darker undertones of the character.
The Poppea set is lush and luminous—a wall textured with white blossoms that shift colors under light. In a tub at center stage, romance blooms. That same tub becomes the scene of Seneca’s suicide, sung with stately gravity by Evan Hughes, whose burnished bass-baritone has earned him accolades across Europe.
The women of Poppea—Amanda Lynn Bottoms, Kearstin Piper Brown, Joelle Lamarre, and Whitney Morrison—are luxury casting. They double as allegorical figures (Virtue, Love, Fortune) and also Roman nobility. This is color-conscious casting in a piece that’s deeply entangled with race and American memory. Bottoms brings fire, Brown glows with lyricism, Lamarre takes daring risks, and Morrison combines brilliance with sumptuous warmth.
In Du Bois’s original tale, the story ends in lynching. Here, the twin operas end with a suggestion—love might be the answer. But in our current world, it feels heartbreakingly distant.
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