‘The Dictator’s Wife’ Shows Lots of Initiative at WNO


It’s a common complaint that you hear about opera, especially from some younger people when they look up from their phones. What’s it to us? It’s old. What does it have to do with the world we live in today?

Potentially, it has a lot to do with us, and, even though opera is attached like an umbilical cord to its most enduring and classic aspects and tropes, the familiar music and tales that make grand opera grand as an experience and new again when first encountered. Opera is also moving forward, enlarging and enriching the scope of its content.

You could see a little and a lot about the future of opera in modern times last weekend with the Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative Festival, with the staging of the new one-hour opera, “The Dictator’s Wife,” performed last Friday and Sunday at the Kennedy Center’s Family Theater, along with a trio of 20-minute operas on Saturday.

It’s all part of a yearly event begun at the WNO under its Artistic Director Francesca Zambello in 2012 to showcase new talent in all phases of opera, including composers and librettists, directors, designers, musicians and performers.

This year, the showcase also acts as a lead-in to the spring portion of the WNO 2016-2017 season which begins Feb. 25 with “Dead Man Walking” (based on the film) with music by star contemporary composer Jake Heggie (the fabulous “Moby Dick”) and a libretto by playwright Terence McNally (“Master Class,” “Frankie and Johnny in the Claire DeLune,”  “Ragtime” and “The Lisbon Traviata” among many other plays and librettos).

The season continues on its contemporary journey March 4 with the much anticipated company premiere and new WNO production of “Champion,” based on  the true story of Emile Griffith, the closeted gay welterweight boxer, whose knockout of a homophobic rival led to tragedy. The music is by legendary jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard, who has created a soulful, groundbreaking score infused by jazz, the blues and Afro-Carribean stylings.

The spring season ends in the classic manner with a production an audience favorite—Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly,” beginning May 6.

The three 20-minute operas this weekend — along with “The Dictator’s Wife” on the other hand —touched on opera’s potential to embrace new worlds, new styles, new themes and new artists.

The three 20-minute chamber operas included “Lifeboat” by Matthew Peterson and Emily Roller, “Adam” by Zach Redler and J. Douglas Carlson and “What Gets Kept” by Frances Pollock and Vanessa Moody.

You could make a lot of “The Dictator’s Wife,” the one-hour creation by the versatile 31-year-old Arab-American composer Mohammed Fairouz, who has made strong impressions in almost every area of modern classical music, notably his fourth symphony, “In the Shadow of No Towers” for wind ensemble, about American life in the aftermath of 9/11. New and upcoming work includes a collaboration with the Bang on a Can All-Stars in the United Arab Emirates, “The New Prince,” an opera with a libretto by Washington Post editorial writer and novelist David Ignatius for the Dutch National Opera and “Bhutto,” a world premiere with a libretto by Pakistani-American writer Mohammed Hanif, who also wrote the libretto for “The Dictator’s Wife.”

It’s hard to tell what state the dictator’s wife resides in or who her husband might be—although a top aide and character is dressed in U.S. army green and wears a too-long red tie while the wife in question has the physical look of a certain first-lady to be.  She’s all-at-once languid, angry, frustrated. She’s a pacer and a poseur, holding down the fort while her husband—the dictator—seems to have locked himself up in the loo and is not coming out soon.  Outside, and in and among the audience, are a group of demonstrators, desperate and at odds with themselves: start the war, stop the war, asking for electricity, amnesty for a son facing death for cowardice, a woman offering to sell her children (apparently a common practice) for a fridge full of food, and the evocative  “Kill poverty, not the poor.”

While it is tempting—and really, fruitless—to try to find analogy and similarity to our times and situation— the proceedings could be really anywhere, anytime when people are starving, when wars are brewing, when tension is in the air like a kind of dank perfume.  In the modern world, everyone is living in dangerous times.

Director Ethan McSweeny, who’s had great success in the past at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, manages to make things within a framework of the limited space of the Family Theatre. There’s an army of roses on stage, demonstrators pacing in the aisles and the dividers—and the imposing figure of the wife pacing like a very articulate, word-loving tigress.

In this task, Allegra DeVita, the young mezzo-soprano and WNO Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist member, reigns supreme. Her voice is rangy and matches the music, operatic but also echoing a minute ago. It’s a fine singing performance, but better yet, a terrific acting performance.  She finds the notes, but also the nuances in the woman and the part by making it her own. She’s at turns sexy, driving, angry, beguiling and charismatic.

I suppose you could call it political theater of sorts. But at its best, the music is bracing and embracing, and the text is like last week. It’s American as well as very worldly, earthy and pungent and colloquially expressive.

You can see how this opera—enlarged and lengthier — might become something bigger—a classic opera, even. Nevertheless, it works in its brief present and time like a complaint, like a lament, like a kind of state of danger, reflective.

“The Dictator’s Wife” is about what comes next, and what you can do with the new, a kind of preview — in terms of the repertoire of opera. It’s an addition, a way of making room, without throwing anything away. That’s also true for the WNOs American Opera Initiative Festival.

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