Seattle Opera Serves Up a Hot, Transcendental Mess

At a crucial moment in Seattle Opera’s world premiere production of Amelia, (which opened on Saturday night and runs through May 22), a character throws open a curtain in a hospital room. Before him he sees his wife, named Amelia, in a coma, her dead father parading around in his Navy whites, ghostly apparitions of his dead mother-in-law and a Vietnamese family and their dead daughter, a crew of doctors and nurses trying to save a young boy’s life, and The Flier (Amelia Earhart). He yells, "What’s happening here?"

That’s gonna take some explaining.

Amelia is the first new opera commissioned by Seattle Opera’s General Director Speight Jenkins in his distinguished 27-year career. The opera is beautifully composed by Daron Aric Hagen and the music is particularly good in the early scenes where the young Amelia is gazing at the stars, and when the older Amelia is recalling her dead father. In these passages, the music seems to float and soar, helped by a wonderful array of percussion instruments (two percussionists in the orchestra play 14 instruments). The music is only weak in two late scenes where it seems to summon up the ghost of Max Steiner scoring a Bette Davis weeper circa 1937.

Conductor Gerard Schwarz delivers excellent pacing and and deftly moves the 46-piece orchestra through dramatic crescendos with gusto, but also handles the sensitive, quiet scenes between Amelia and her husband with grace. The sets (Thomas Lynch) and lighting (Duane Schuler) are astonishingly beautiful.

The opera is well sung by a large, talented cast that, typical for operas produced in the Jenkins era, is notable for strong voices from top to bottom. Musically, the high point is a scene in Vietnam where we hear beautifully sung phrases in Vietnamese. For the most part, the opera is directed with great skill by director Stephen Wadsworth, but its fractured nature doesn’t allow any of the performers to get the kind of momentum that is needed to really create a fully realized character (though several of the singers really shine).

First and foremost are the magnificent performances of Nathan Gunn as Paul and Kate Lindsey as Amelia. Gunn makes you feel the pain of a man whose marriage is nearly doomed by forces beyond his control and beyond time itself. Lindsey brings intensity to the role of a woman who is frightened about the fate of an unborn child and it builds nicely until a finish that is out of control.

In his role as Dodge, William Burden brings depth to a cipher of  a character that is in virtually every scene, but as a dramatic pawn, slotted in here and there. David Won, Karen Vuong, and Museop Kim are wonderful in their scenes in Vietnam: deeply felt, honest and humble. That scene, properly expanded, might make a great opera in itself. Jordan Bisch, as Daedalus and the father of young, dying boy, is wonderful as a large lumbering dad who is devastated by the loss of a son. And, finally, powerhouse soprano Jane Eaglen, of all people, shows up in a small role in the final two scenes. Though the role is underwritten, almost an aside, it was good to hear her voice and I was grateful for a chance to see her on the Seattle Opera stage once again.

In constrast, the undeniably poetic libretto by Gardner McFall, based on a story treatment by Wadsworth, is convoluted and muddled to the extreme. Consider that in a short, two-hour opera we get ghostly apparitions or flashbacks, or both, in every scene. The opera opens in the 1960s with a young girl named Amelia, who has been named after the famous flyer. She is on the lawn singing about the beauty of flying. Her father, a Navy pilot, whom Amelia deeply loves, comes to put her to bed.

While they are in the bedroom, on another part of the stage, the pilot’s wife is met by two Navy messengers who inform her that her husband has been shot down and is missing. Meanwhile, back in the bedroom, the little girl has fallen asleep and, we assume, dreaming. Because who should show up but the real Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, in the cockpit of their Lockheed Electra.

Jump ahead to America, 1996, and the grown Amelia is now married and pregnant with her first child. She and her husband Paul are asleep and, you guessed it, Amelia must be dreaming again because Daedalus and Icarus are sharing the room with them. Trouble is, when the young couple wakes up, the subjects of her dream stay in the room busily building feathered wings while Paul and Amelia get up and get ready for work.

(As the scene plays on, Amelia’s mother, who we’ve been told died a few months ago, suddenly appears in the room. In Amelia no one, it seems, ever really dies. They just come back as extras.)

Then, we flash back ten years to 1986, where Amelia and her Mother are in Vietnam searching for answers about the fate of Dodge, the Navy pilot. But this is more than just a flashback, because damned if we don’t flashback in this scene to a war torn, 1960s Vietnam.

In the program, lectures and promotional events, Seattle Opera has used phrases like nonlinear, dream imagery, transcendental, and mythic representation to describe this opera. All well and good, but if you divorce yourself from what people are telling you the opera means, and just look at the stage, you get scenes in a hospital where seemingly every other character in the story, including all the dead ones, are showing up and Earhart lands her Lockheed Electra on the roof and the kid who played Icarus three scenes ago is dying in a hospital bed with "massive injuries."

And it all might be an edgy, transcendental slice of postmodernism, but why is Earhart walking around the delivery room reading the newspaper and saying, "I was never bored?" And if she’s just a dream, how can she pick up a paper? Do the other characters, who can’t see her, just see a newspaper floating in the air?

Nonlinear can't be an excuse to be nonsensical. Buried deep in the opera we see onstage is a great story (or three or four) waiting to get out. I believe this opera will be rebuilt, tightened and reborn as something truly exceptional, but for now its appeal seems hit-or-miss.

The very talented people who put this hot mess together have a story in there about a young girl who is pregnant, yet haunted by the fear and anger over the death of her father. She has transferred that anger and fear to her unborn child and it’s forcing her to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Her gentle, loving husband, Paul, is desperately trying to hold her, and their lives, together.

You get a glimpse of what that great opera would look like in the second act opening, when Amelia bursts into her husband’s office and begs her husband to stop his work designing military planes. In a few, startling moments, you see a woman torn apart by memory and you hear a man’s anguish to be sharing his marriage with a ghost and pleading with his wife to try to move on.

Had the creators of this opera hung on that line, if they had pushed that story to the fore and drilled into what poets have called the "tyranny of memory," they would have had a trim, tight opera with the potential to become a classic. They have the musical and dramatic chops, and the two singers to do it.

But somewhere along the line they lost track of that story and piled so much imagery and dreamlike business onto the back of it that they collapsed the story. We’re left with a maddening and confusing tale. It recalled Pauline Kael’s review of Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits. That film, she said, suffered from having too many ideas. Amelia does, too.

The end of the performance on Saturday night was met with both thunderous applause and nervous laughter. I can't tell you what your response will be, but the chances seem good you'll either love it...or not.