![]() ![]() He deals cards at the Empire Hotel bar, she entices the customers. There is a Mexican couple, Ramón and Josefa. Joe’s friend Clarence is a virile fellow miner who seems to play an ambiguous role, sometimes defusing and sometimes exacerbating racial tensions. Joe Cannon is a miner who has just been dumped by his fiancée back in Missouri whatever compassion we feel for him disappears when he turns out to be a nasty drunk. He consorts with an upwardly-mobile Chinese prostitute, Ah Sing, who wants him, but his own feelings toward her come and go. Although the libretto does not spell it out, Sellars’ direction indicates that Dame Shirley and Ned have a thing for each other in violation of every taboo of the period, not to mention the fact that she is already married, albeit unhappily. A fugitive slave turned cowboy, Ned Peters, turns out to be a noble character with an intellectual bent. The opera is strewn with characters and incidents drawn with the historical record and the Sellars agenda in mind. Lorena Feijóo as Lola Montez in the new Adams opera. Dame Shirley becomes what amounts to a journalistic character in this opera, always observing with a keen eye and a completely open mind, and quoted virtually verbatim in stretches of the libretto. If there is one dominant source, it is the letters of Louise Clappe, a writer who, under the nom de plume of Dame Shirley, chronicled the lifestyles and times she witnessed while living in the miner camps for a couple of years in the early 1850s. ![]() Act I is a seemingly scattershot collage of incidents in the camp of Rich Bar circa 1851, while Act II in the Gold Country town of Downieville finally propels the plot forward.Īs has often been the case recently, Sellars’ libretto is a patchwork of this and that culled from found sources. The new opera, Adams’ fifth overall, seems to operate like a two-movement Lutosławski symphony, with the first part merely setting the table for the second part. For Adams, the mission is also personal, since he has a cabin in the Gold Country just up the road from the scene of his opera. Ultimately, the Sellars agenda of support for underdogs, particularly if they happen to be in minority ethnic groups, is in our faces again. If, for instance, you want to believe that these rambling, gambling, seat-of-the-pants gold prospectors are the ancestors of today’s creators of overvalued tech companies, Adams and Sellars won’t stop you. The two creators have not been shy to point out similarities between the issues raised in their story and the rise of Silicon Valley just down the peninsula, the unleashing of bigotries hidden from general view before the 2016 election, or the dangers of man-made global warming. If there is any resemblance to present-day problems, it is not a coincidence. Adams and Sellars open a window upon the dark side of the California Gold Rush of the 1850s - the greed, the racism, the violence, the despoiling of the Gold Country in the Sierra Nevada. What Girls of the Golden West attempts to do is offer an alternative to Puccini’s spaghetti Western by setting the historical record straight. Is it a rewrite of the famous Puccini opera of virtually the identical name? Is it a parody of same? Or does it have nothing to do with it? The answers are: None of the above. Paul Appleby as Joe Cannon and J’Nai Bridges as Josefa Segovia. The provocative title of their newest collaboration, Girls of the Golden West, certainly did that, raising eyebrows and questions in opera circles well before its world premiere at San Francisco Opera’s appropriately gilded War Memorial Opera House on Nov. SAN FRANCISCO - If there is one thing that John Adams and his constant co-conspirator Peter Sellars are experts at, it is getting our attention. Hye Jung Lee as Ah Sing in John Adams and Peter Sellars’ ‘Girls of the Golden West’ at San Francisco Opera. ![]()
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