What would the critic who described Tosca as a “shabby little shocker” make of Suddenly Last Summer? This Grand Guignol miniature by Tennessee Williams manages to cram cannibalism, lobotomy, incest and pederasty into a compact hour, after all. Williams’ writing often rises to an operatic fever pitch, but a new music theater adaptation of the work, composed by Courtney Bryan and presented by Opera Philadelphia, only occasionally captures the high stakes and intense thrills of the source material.
Working with the librettists Daniel Fish and Gideon Lester, Bryan trims much of the fat from Williams’ story, putting the focus squarely on the tortured triangle of personalities at its center. The action occurs after the death of Sebastian Venable, an eccentric flâneur who spent his summers traveling to exotic locales and composing a single poem. His mother Violet (Stephanie Roth Haberle) cannot accept the version of events told by his cousin, Catherine (Mikaela Bennett), who was with him when he died on a tawdry Spanish island called Cabeza de Lobo. She summons Dr Cukrowicz (Branden Lindsay), an experimental neurosurgeon, in the hopes that a lobotomy will keep Catherine quiet and preserve her son’s reputation.
Fish directed the premiere at Bard College in June, with the Philadelphia production supervised by Mikhaela Mahony. Whereas Williams presented Suddenly Last Summer as an unabashed melodrama, the adaptation feels both intellectualized and distanced. Marsha Ginsberg’s scenic design replaces the stately New Orleans mansion setting with a scattered row of office chairs, a few plants and an onstage artist (Lucy Tarquinio) creating live, improvisational paintings that match the actions being described. If the intention was to highlight the rotten truths beneath the manicured surface, the stark minimalism does it in a too-literal way. Terese Wadden’s costume design uncomfortably straddles between periods, although Stacey Derosier’s lighting is appropriately evocative.
Bryan’s most striking musical choice is to make Catherine the only character who sings, while the other roles are spoken by actors. This invites a heavy-handed metaphor – the truth-teller communicates in a manner her oppressors cannot comprehend – and it reduces much of the score to incidental music, with staccato notes and pre-recorded sound cues suspended in the background as Violet and Dr Cukrowicz speak. Textures remain spare throughout. It’s surprising that Bryan, a native of New Orleans, doesn’t try to evoke the city’s particular sound world, given its importance to the story and its vivid description in Williams’ writing.
Conductor Nathan Koci and a reduced complement of the Opera Philadelphia Orchestra handled the assignment well, but there were large stretches of the production where the music seemed like an afterthought. That feeling disappeared whenever Mikaela Bennett took center stage. Bryan’s vocal writing strongly conveys Catherine’s distorted mental state – sustained phrases that break off and snap, notes that play with pitch to an almost psychological degree – and Bennett met those challenges without sacrificing beauty of tone. As an actor, she proved riveting in Catherine’s account of Sebastian’s murder, more than holding her own alongside the occasionally overwrought Haberle and the compellingly sympathetic Lindsay. (The production also includes asynchronous performances by the actors Miriam Silverman and Nick Westrate, as Catherine’s conniving mother and brother.)
Bryan gives voice to Sebastian through a children’s chorus, performed by members of the Philadelphia Boys Choir. It’s a provocative choice, suggesting both Sebastian’s arrested youth and the predilections that contributed to his death. But the production keeps Catherine and the chorus offstage for long stretches of time, further minimizing the musical impact of this opera. When the boys do appear, wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the image of St Sebastian, the effect is a bit too gauche.
A Tennessee Williams play, with its florid text and outsized emotionality, can often seem like an opera waiting for music. In Suddenly Last Summer, it’s hard not to feel like you’re still waiting.
