Show reviewed:  Our Town

Composer:  Ned Rorem

Librettist:  J. D. McClatchy

Based on the play by Thornton Wilder

Date saw the show:  June 29, 2008
Place saw the show:  Kansas City, Missouri
Company: Civic Opera Theater of Kansas City
Principal Leads:  Adam Wade Duncan; Megan King; Jedd Schneider
Stage Director: Rick Truman
Artistic Director/Music Director:  Andy Anderson 

Reviewed by: Deborah Ground Buckner (Kansas City Correspondent - USA)

I grew up on Thornton Wilder's play, Our Town.  It was a favorite of audiences of my hometown's community theater.  Growing up in a small town, I knew Grover's Corners well.  The characters in the play were people living up and down my town's Main Street.

Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning play opened on Broadway in 1938. Wilder wrote the screenplay for a film based on the play in 1940, starring William Holden and Martha Scott. Aaron Copland composed the score for the film.  There have been at least four made-for-television versions of the play as well.   

Yet, when Aaron Copland and, later, Leonard Bernstein approached Wilder about composing an opera based on the play, he turned them down. Thirty years after Wilder's death, Ned Rorem obtained permission from the Wilder family to take the story to opera. With Rorem as composer and J. D. McClatchy as librettist, the opera was commissioned by Indiana University, Opera Boston, the Aspen Music Festival and School, North Carolina School of the Arts, Lake George Opera in Saratoga Springs, New York, and Festival Opera in Walnut Creek, California. The opera had its premiere at Indiana University in February, 2006; its professional debut followed with the Lake George Opera company in July of that year. There have since been some thirteen stagings of the work, a tremendous success for a new opera.

The opera opens with a parade of townspeople singing the old hymn "O, God, Our Help in Ages Past." It sets the time and place well, conjuring the image of small town life and traditional values. As with the play, the opera has a minimal set, limited to chairs, stepladders and benches that are moved about as necessary. Like Wilder's play, the opera is presented in three acts.   

Act One introduces life in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, presenting the characters of Emily Webb and her parents, Editor and Mrs. Webb; George Gibbs, and his parents, Doc and Mrs. Gibbs; neighborhood gossip Mrs. Soames; drunken choir director Simon Stimson; and the Stage Manager. In the play, the Stage Manager is a multi-faceted character serving as narrator and stepping in to play the role of other characters as needed. He has an almost god-like quality, clearly a being who makes things happen. This carries through in the opera.  While the play Stage Manager quoted a number of important facts and figures describing the town and population of Grover's Corners, the opera's Stage Manager is aided by the sur-title screen that flashes such information, supplementing his sung passages.

Megan King, soprano, is a perfect Emily Webb. Her performance is bright and animated, personifying the pretty, smart girl who loves to make speeches at school and is able to talk baseball-obsessed George Gibbs through the problems of Algebra homework. Jedd Schneider, tenor, as George conveys a splendid boyhood mix of being impressed by the smart, pretty girl, but not enough to ignore the calls of his fellow ballplayers, depicted by a fun trio (Tyler Beck, Aaron Burns, and Lucas Pherigo).  Lindsey Marie Bush, soprano, gives a pleasant turn as practical Mrs. Webb, assuring Emily she is "pretty enough for all normal purposes." 

I have always pictured the Stage Manager as a gruff, older personality, and, if I were a composer, would have written his role as a bass or at least a baritone. But the Stage Manager is sung by a tenor, and, happily, that voice is supplied by Adam Wade Duncan. In addition to a lovely voice, Duncan conveys the appropriate mix of both sympathy and aloofness required from the role. The Stage Manager is both one with the characters and apart from them at the same time.

As Doc Gibbs, Phil Eatherton, baritone, has an amusing scene with Mrs. Soames as a patient and a stern fatherly reprimand of George for failing to do his chores around the home.

Act Two begins with George and Emily's wedding day, then, in flashback, shows how this came to be. As in the play, the young couple has an important conversation deciding their futures over ice cream sodas. On the morning of their wedding, George pays a call to the Webb home, where a superstitious Mrs. Webb is determined to keep him from seeing Emily before the ceremony. In a comic scene, George and his future father-in-law sit in silence for several moments. This quiet time, unusual for an opera, depicts all the awkwardness demanded of the occasion. When Editor Webb (Matt Haney, baritone) speaks, he shares the advice his father gave him on his wedding day, then proudly states he took the opposite approach and has been a happy man. Just before the ceremony, Emily and George each share the fears of the impending nuptials.  Happiness overtakes the fear, and all the town joins in the celebration. 

Act Three resumes the opening hymn. It is now apparent the parade is a funeral procession.   A gathering of chairs represents the cemetery, where the dead, now including Mrs. Gibbs (Lucille Windsor), Simon StimsonRobert Pherigo) , and Mrs. Soames (Kristee Haney)  are at rest.  Emily goes to join them as Mrs. Gibbs explains she has died giving birth to her second child.  In contrast to the quiet serenity of the dead, Emily is agitated, clearly torn between the two worlds.  With the Stage Manager's help, she returns to relive one day, against the admonitions of the dead.  She chooses her thirteenth birthday, with the experience of not only living the day, but also knowing the future.  It becomes overwhelming, and Emily begs to go back to the land of the dead.  Here, in the only true aria of the opera, she says her good-byes to the world.  This passage in the play is one of the most powerful in literature:  " Good-bye , Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners....Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking....and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths....and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth,you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every,every minute?"  In the opera, the passage is rephrased to rhyme.  In the wrong hands, this could be fatal, but the music is powerful enough, and, along with Miss King's emotional delivery, it is not diminished.  While I frantically dabbed at my eyes during this moment, I heard a chorus of sniffles throughout the audience. 

That is the power of Our Town, both as a play and as an opera.   The words take the viewer to a place deep within, to one's own town and one's own people.  The emotions presented are universal, and each will experience them in an individual way.  Leaving the darkened theater and stepping outside, one suddenly becomes aware of everything, the sounds of traffic, the scent of summer in the breeze, the hum of pleasant conversation.  For a moment-and longer than that, we can hope-there is the new opportunity to realize life while it is lived.