Left to Right: Cedric Berry, Yusef Salaam,
Korey Wise, Nathan Granner, Orson Van Gay, Raymond Santana, Derrell
Acon, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Bernard Holcomb (singers are
Cedric, Nathan, Orson, Derrell and Bernard - they are all standing next
to the person whom they portray in the opera). (Rob Shanahan)
Anne Midgette
June 20, 2019
You’ve seen the TV show, now see the opera.
On
June 15, “The Central Park Five,” a new opera by composer Anthony
Davis, had its world premiere at the Long Beach Opera (the final
performances are June 22 and 23) — only two weeks after Netflix launched
Ava Duvernay’s miniseries “When They See Us.” Both works focus on the
1989 assault of a jogger in New York’s Central Park, and the subsequent
conviction of five young black men who were ultimately exonerated in
2002, after they had already served their sentences. The incident was
also, Davis points out, “the beginning of Donald Trump’s political
career.” (Ken Burns made a documentary, also titled “The Central Park
Five,” in 2012.)
Davis has a history of making
operas about subjects that also attracted film directors: his first
opera was “X (The Life and Times of Malcolm X),” and he followed with
“Amistad.” On a red-letter weekend for African American opera — Terence
Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” based on Charles M. Blow’s
memoir, also had its world premiere this weekend at the Opera Theater of
St. Louis — Davis spoke with us about working hip-hop into opera, the
field’s relationship to African American composers, and the challenges
of turning Donald Trump into an opera character.
(This interview has been edited and condensed.)
Q: You
keep writing operas on topics that also become big films, and always
before the films came out. When you started "The Central Park Five," did
you know about "When They See Us," Ava du Vernay's Netflix series about
the story?
A: Anthony
Davis: I started working on “The Central Park Five” in 2014. [More
recently,] I saw that Netflix was going to do this. With “X,” I did it
five years before Spike Lee. [Steven] Spielberg was weird about
“Amistad.” He actually pushed up the [film’s] opening in Chicago.
[Davis’s opera “Amistad” was commissioned by the Lyric Opera of
Chicago.] The film opened two weeks earlier in Chicago than anywhere
else.
Q: How did you decide to write an opera about the Central Park Five?
A: I was speaking to the Trilogy
Opera Company, a primarily African American opera company based in
Newark, about an opera. I wanted to do Amiri Baraka’s “Dutchman.” The
director said, I have this libretto [that playwright/screenwriter]
Richard Wesley wrote about the Central Park Five; would you be
interested in reading it? I thought it had a lot of potential. I had
never done an opera with five protagonists before. I had to figure out
how to do that. I was fascinated by group singing. Then I began thinking
about that period in time, Take 6 and a lot of the boy groups that were
popular in that time. I started looking at what I could do with close
harmony for five voices.
One of the things I
thought was fascinating about the Central Park Five: 1989 was the time
when hip-hop was becoming mainstream. Even the terminology “wilding in
the park” came from the fact they were singing [Tone Lōc’s] “Wild
Thing.” All the kids were singing the song.
Q: Did you actually use hip-hop in the opera?
A: Yes
and no. What I decided to do, I borrowed, the way hip-hop samples music
from earlier; I tried to use funk grooves that they might use. And I
tried to capture a little bit of what hip-hop does with rhythm and
speech. I have this section of the opera called “We are the freaks who
own the night;” the way the lyrics tumble out, it’s very much inspired
by the way hip-hop works.
Q: Has the opera field's attitude toward race changed over the years?
A: I
think there’s an openness now. Opera America has been a great advocate
for more diversity in opera. I’ve been a consultant for them,
encouraging more composers of color to work in opera. We see the Opera
Theater of St. Louis and Long Beach Opera and Opera Philadelphia
involved with community and creating new works by composers of color;
that’s been a great trend. It’s also important musically to broaden the
aesthetic of what opera can be.
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