Seattle Opera has just opened its new production of Tazewell Thompson’s Jubilee, expanded from its previous a cappella version, with vocal arrangements by Dianne Adams McDowell and orchestrations by Michael Ellis Ingram. It was a beautiful night in McCaw Hall, though I’m not quite sure it’s found its final form yet. The music is great, really great, and makes good use of the source material as researched by Thompson and expanded by both McDowell and Ingram. (Thompson is best known for his Blue at New Orleans Opera.)
However, while it is an amazing act of scholarship on Thompson’s part, the bits and pieces didn’t always come together: it is almost like one of those Tin Pan Alley musicals set in a theatre with the numbers onstage and the interactions between the characters playing the roles that sometime echo the onstage play within a play. It doesn't always hold together, especially in the first act—we had an arrangement of a spiritual followed by spoken dialogue by one of the singers with some great moments interspersed with one of the cast playing, say, the chorus master, which was, for me, all too reminiscent of various directors and conductors in my own life as a singer, but it never really came together for me.
But those moments were also the moments that the piece really came alive for me—when I was reminded of my own travels and of my own coming out a gay man and later—who knew?—as a person more gender indeterminate. I’ve often felt a real relationship between early struggles of the blacks in the Deep South of the US and queers in the '60s. Those moments of struggle really moved me as I went through the journeys of the Fisk Jubilee singers in the early 1900s and the rise of gay liberation in the 1960s. I felt a kinship between their stories and mine.
But I became more sure of the work in its second half, which largely used a now mostly defunct style known as 'melodrama', spoken texts to music, in this case with texts taken from the archives of the Fisk University Library and the Library of Congress. Melodrama isn’t the overacted and too often underproduced art form it sometimes became; instead, on both sides of the Atlantic, it put words to new music, creating a new thing out of their juncture.
This occurs in a major and important way in this production, with glorious stretches of music bearing up the story of the first three tours of the Jubilee Singers complaining of hunger, of their desire to sing opera and not just music created by and intended for black audiences, of one illicit love or another, including that of a singer who came back to help his partner, another man, back to health. This is by far the best section of the opera, for me at least, and it elicited and stirred the audience to quiet agreement, a chorus of “oh, yes, sir” and “no, m’am,” the kind of thing you can still hear in a black church today doing call and response.
One could really see how the spiritual, now and then, met the needs of the people who made it, and who were there for it, though at the possible cost of white members of the audience who might sometimes have felt left out—but I’ve spent time as a singer in black churches and felt that ability to add to the tale being told by the choir and the preacher and the congregation as a whole, to be part of sighing, as Paul put it when speaking of the Holy Spirit, in “sighs too deep for words.”
A second melodrama doesn't fare quite as well, in which the singers speak of the fates of those first nine members on that first journey as they faced fame in Europe, some of them, or leaving music after over-singing their young voices, still too common an experience for some singers.
The stories are tragic enough, of course, but it felt like a bit too much of the last few minutes of a British procedural in which we hear what happened to the various characters—rather than see it dramatically, as theatre and opera can do so well.
The projections help immensely. Designed by Shawn Duan in his Seattle Opera debut, the bit early on when the students, digging in their garden, discover a great cache of weapons, gags and masks, is accompanied by the images of the weapons on the ground. Throughout, the projections help set tone and identify locations of the opera’s various events. When the singers return to the university, an early 20th century image appears to remind us that, in Jubilee, events come round again, as the singers tell their stories. And the singing is wonderful, with connections to the black theatre of the 19th century, to jazz, and to what black and white composers and librettists would make of the musical material that grew into the musical.
All in all, an enjoyable evening and one that continued the work of exploring black tradition and history through song. It was worth being there, as the audience embraced their own pasts. Jubilee certainly has its own future, and Blue even more so, and maybe Jubilee will deserve yet another look in the future. It certainly has a tough and heartfelt story of its own to tell with wonderful singers, many making their Seattle Opera debut.