The Harbingers
Music by Rosśa Crean
Libretto by Kendra Leonard
Composer/singer-produced, October 2024
There's a lot to unpack about this show - the confines (and terrifying freedoms) of singer-produced opera, the difficulty of unaccompanied/a capella works, and deciding on a storytelling ethos for a show with characters drawn from world mythology and religion.
The Harbingers had its world premiere in 2019 at Rosehill Cemetery's May Chapel, and this restaging was in the same venue. This operatic one-act (running about 55 minutes) follows an unnamed soul immediately after their death. They find themselves at the center of a conflict between the deities of many world religions, each vying for ownership of this fresh soul. Harbingers pulls its characters from Judaism, Gaelic traditions, the Greek & Egyptian pantheons, and more. The piece is English-language, framed by Latin and Gaelic arias - we used projected supertitles to not only inform the audience of the content of those sections, but also to improve accessibility. Just because the piece is mostly in English, it would be easy to dismiss the need for supertitles, but I strongly recommend them whenever possible. It's a huge service to those with accessibility needs and to expand operatic audiences - your work risks losing its meaning if your audience can't understand half of what the singers are saying.
My treatment for the show focused on a somewhat well-worn characterization of the ethereal. When confronted with things beyond human comprehension, our minds try to contextualize them in a recognizable form to maintain our sanity. In this world, it is revealed that the soul used to be a doctor. With that in mind, we dropped these deities into the recognizable framework of a hospital. The Donn, an Irish god of the dead, opens the show as a janitor, preparing the space as the other harbingers howl from the balcony in a language incomprehensible to our ears. Hel, a Norse goddess presiding over the underworld, appears in surgical scrubs, arms drenched in blood. The Moirai, the three Greek fates, appear in black business suits - the legal and financial arm of the hospital, the ones who truly have the final say on what happens to the patients inside.
I'm a big fan of the creative use of supernumeraries - it's not uncommon for small scenes between two characters to be presented by two actors even when the dramatic context of their discussion may be deeply rooted in their not being alone. But supers? In this economy? Both in my concert work and in operas, I prefer to have the other singers onstage when possible (and appropriate) to fill these roles. Here, before any given harbinger entered the space as themselves, they began the show wearing a white lab coat as nameless hospital staff. As the deities enter the main playing space, they remove their coat to reveal their costume - this process narratively translates to the god entering a particular body to join the primary plot. Until then, the staff is responsible for handling paperwork, requests from the other gods, managing medical equipment, and more.
With a solid footing in the dramatic world I wanted to create, it was time to address the elephant in the room. Crean composed this piece and billed it as "an unaccompanied opera in one act". That is to say, there are no instrumentalists in the ensemble - the score calls for 10 vocalists and nothing more. This leads to many fascinating challenges, especially given the relative difficulty and complexity of the music. The interplay of the human voice, breath, and silence, forms the acoustic cornerstone of the piece.
Due to my love of supernumeraries, I had almost all of the characters onstage from the beginning to the end of the show. This meant I couldn't rely on having people find their notes before they entered the playing space, so I needed to find some way to tune the cast live in the space. Our solution was to include a few singing bowls throughout the space. Some were rung from the balcony, some were onstage and used by the singers at specific points to signal specific staging events while handily also offering the correct next note for everyone to check their pitch. Since so much of the piece is recit-adjacent, there were passages where singers could go drift without repercussions, but this allowed us to set each other up for success during key dramatic moments, when an exact pitch was necessary for particularly high or low sections, or to square up before ensemble moments. We also made sure that these were always used in pauses - we didn't want to accidentally reveal to the audience that we had shifted a quarter tone sharp or flat by having the tone ring out simultaneously with a singer.
The open, vibrant tone of the singing bowls fit perfectly in the chapel's resonant space. The May Chapel, as a beautiful, historic building requires careful consideration regarding scenic, lighting, and audience needs. No major set pieces can be installed, as the chapel is an active part of the Rosehill landscape, and is regularly used for services. Anything you set up in the space for the run of a show (including tech rehearsals) must be conceived to permit rapid setup and teardown. The building is over 100 years old, and there are precious few power outlets for stage lights and a supertitle projector. As one would expect from a chapel's seating arrangement, the floor is flat, making sightlines for audience members a prime concern. Even with these difficulties, the space is beautiful and fulfilling to work in, requiring careful thought when building the world of a show.
The final point I want to visit in this retrospective is the idea of independent, artist-produced opera. Rosśa Crean, the composer, contacted me about directing this piece as a self-produced endeavor. There would be no company or support staff backing the project, just some chutzpah and a talented cast they had already assembled. Some were new faces, some performers from the original production, and some old friends. We didn't have a music director, stage manager, production manager, marketing director. There was no existing funding from past productions that would go to fund the initial expenses of putting this together. And somehow, it still worked.
Jessie Lyons, playing Azrael, helmed our social media outreach. Anna Caldwell, her cover, helped me take notes, organize the space and storage, ran supertitles, and even took our production photos. Kat Dalin (Atropos, one of the Greek Fates) handled the bulk of our costuming needs and pulled together a great deal of our props. Jordan Harris, portraying Sekhmet with joy and power, secured our rehearsal venue. And conductor Alexis Enyart took time out of her incredibly busy schedule to work with us for a few key music rehearsals to really make the piece shine.
It takes a village, and Chicago's storefront opera scene has a rich bounty of artists with a deep passion for the work. The sense of community, friendship, and support is inspiring. I'm delighted to work with all of my comrades presenting innovative work in compelling, accessible ways. It has been years since I've worked on a production this scrappy - it's nice to know I've still got the skills for it, even though I generally prefer to work with an established organization to take advantage of all the luxuries that come with an existing support structure.
