Though Angels in America remains a pungent period piece about the late-20th-century AIDS epidemic, the 21st century couldn't help but creep into the New York City Opera production of Peter Eotvos' operatic version in highly beneficial ways.
The angel of the title, which may be here to save our beleaguered nation, wore a Hillary Clinton pantsuit (white, of course) with a shoot-from-the-hip sense of self-possession. Portrayals of increasingly distant historic figures like shady super-lawyer Roy Cohn no longer need to resemble the real thing. Best of all, the 1993 play is far enough in the past that you're less inclined to expect the two-hour-plus opera version to deliver the seven-hour play’s experience. I doubted the opera's viability when I heard its haphazard 2004 premiere at Paris' Châtelet Theater. The City Opera's Saturday opening changed my mind.
Operas often need years to find their legs. This one will always be somewhat problematic if only because the original story and characters feel more stereotypical as a side effect of concision — even if the Mari Mezei libretto is fairly deft. Nonetheless, the piece revealed much more of itself at the Saturday opening partly because of the chamber-opera circumstances of the Rose Theater. The Eotvos score emerged with a more controlled sense of invention, not to mention a richness that borders on lush for something so rooted in modernism. The orchestra is used more for its individual sections than collectively, the saxophone writing being a particular source of emotional information. The opera's vocal trio, housed in the orchestra pit, sounded like a mere echo effect at the Châtelet but in the Rose Theater had its own independent purpose, adding a layer of commentary on the stage action. We can thank conductor Pacien Mazzagatti for much of that.
Obviously, the intertwining plots of young gay men coping with AIDS, a Mormon couple whose marriage is devolving amid Valium addiction and Cohn’s fight to keep his law practice are not dramatized prosaically here. Eotvos employs a rich succession of sung, declaimed and spoken dialogue that works mainly because the singers are miked, allowing the various forms of text articulation to unfold in a seamless stream. That’s saying a lot. The largely atonal vocal lines were more eloquent than obscure amid the cast's exceptional dramatic focus — at least most of the time. The Act I finale still feels truncated and some early scenes lack musical sweep though that's the composer's failing.
The production, directed by Sam Helfrich, used a handsome unit set — black tile walls with white windows and doors — that lent itself to the quickly shifting settings from home to hospital to office. Any number of secondary factors — what was happening outside the window, changes in lighting and shifts in stage direction — allowed the opera to cover much dramatic territory in a short period of time.
Casting decisions were made for looks as well as voices, though the singers were all musically well prepared, with Andrew Garland as Prior Walter and Aaron Blake as his errant boyfriend Louis handling the mixture of singing and speech particularly well. The Mormon couple inspired more empathy than judgment with Michael Weyandt managing to be both charismatic and hapless, and Sarah Beckham-Turner steering clear of operatic-madness cliches as her Valium gobbling character hallucinates her way around the world. You're not supposed to like Roy Cohn, though Wayne Tigges was more vocally abrasive than needed. Matthew Reese maintained relative vocal and theatrical restraint as the truth-telling nurse Belize, but must a flamboyantly gay role be written for a countertenor voice? A special word for Kristen Chambers as the angel: Her strong stage presence (beyond the Hillary references) knits together the huge narrative gaps that are inevitable in adapting such an epic play. For all of her efforts, the opera may never make sense without knowing the play first. But opera isn’t necessarily expected to make sense.