PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Gregory Spears & Greg Pierce — FELLOW TRAVELERS (J. Lattanzi, A. Acosta, K. Pracht, K. Thurman, J. Jeremiah, J. Fulton, K. Riess, K. White, J. Harr; Virginia Opera, 12 February 2023)

GREGORY SPEARS (born 1977) and GREG PIERCE (born 1978): Fellow Travelers — Joseph Lattanzi (Hawkins Fuller), Andres Acosta (Timothy Laughlin), Katherine Pracht (Mary Johnson), Katrina Thurman (Miss Lightfoot), Joshua Jeremiah (Senator Joseph McCarthy, Estonian Frank, Interrogator), John Fulton (Senator Charles Potter, General Arlie, Bartender), Kaileigh Riess (Lucy), Kyle White (Tommy McIntyre), Jeremy Harr (Senator Potter’s Assistant, Bookseller, Technician, French Priest, Party Guest); Virginia Opera Chorus, Virginia Symphony Orchestra; Adam Turner, conductor [Kevin Newbury, Director; Victoria Tzykun, Scenic Designer; Paul Carey, Costume Designer; Thomas C. Hase, Lighting Designer; James P. McGough, Wig and Makeup Designer; Virginia Opera, Carpenter Theatre, Dominion Energy Center for the Arts, Richmond, Virginia, USA; Sunday. 12 February 2023]

When their opera Fellow Travelers premièred at Cincinnati Opera in June 2016, composer Gregory Spears and librettist Greg Pierce likely could not have envisioned that, six decades having passed since the Cold War-era ‘lavender scare’ persecuted gay and lesbian civil servants as alleged risks to national security, federal legislation would be required to safeguard Americans’ rights to wed according to the dictates of their hearts. In the contentious political climate and precarious fiscal battleground of this first quarter of the Twenty-First Century, the art form’s champions are continually challenged to reaffirm opera’s relevance. It can be argued that, from its modern inception in Sixteenth-Century Italy, opera has ever been more of a sublime diversion than a conduit for societal evolution, but is not uplifting souls relevant to the human condition of its own accord? In Fellow Travelers, though, composer and librettist intrepidly bared unhealed wounds through song, bringing to the operatic stage a harrowing parable of a love that in too many sectors of today’s America still dares not speak its name. The lamentable timeliness of the opera’s narrative notwithstanding, the concept of relevance is itself irrelevant in the context of Fellow Travelers. As a means of uniting diverse peoples, even if for no longer than the duration of a performance, and telling stories that might otherwise go unheard, opera is necessary.

Arrayed in sixteen scenes, Spears’s and Pierce’s opera is an adaptation of Thomas Mallon’s 2007 Lambda Literary Award-nominated novel of the same title, an absorbing book that traces the progression of a fictitious queer relationship in McCarthy-era Washington. Pierce’s libretto metamorphoses Mallon’s novel into a powerful text that is both intelligible when sung and faithful to the linguistic style of the 1950s. Eschewing easy integration of period-specific trends in popular and Classical idioms, Spears’s music creates an aural atmosphere that is in turn expansive and claustrophobic, heightening the tension of the drama as the protagonists’ romance progresses towards betrayal and disillusionment. The musical language is abidingly tonal but enriched by contrasting serialist and post-Romantic accents, at times fusing Pierre Boulez-like rhythmic structures with harmonic lushness reminiscent of Gian Carlo Menotti’s Last Savage. Whether intimating the burgeoning passion between the opera’s titular ‘fellow travelers,’ State Department official Hawkins Fuller and idealistic journalist Timothy Laughlin, or intensifying the torture of Hawk’s interrogation, the score viscerally amplifies the drama’s psychological shifts. Fellow Travelers is a daunting work, for orchestra and conductor as much as for singers, but the prevailing ethos of Spears’s music is clarity, his writing enabling words and feelings to engage performers and audiences.

Dangerous passion: tenor Andres Acosta as Timothy Laughlin (left) and baritone Joseph Lattanzi as Hawkins Fuller (right) in Virginia Opera’s 2023 production of Gregory Spears’s and Greg Pierce’s Fellow Travelers
[Photograph by Dave Pearson Photography, © by Virginia Opera]

Recreating his world-première staging for Cincinnati Opera, stage director Kevin Newbury reinvigorated Fellow Travelers for its inaugural production by Virginia Opera, reclaiming the trailblazing spirit of the first performances and emphasizing with increased urgency the parallels between institutional oppression in the 1950s and today’s ongoing struggles against elitist and extremist movements. Framed and in some moments sharpened by Victoria Tzykun’s provocative but never distracting scenic designs and Thomas C. Hase’s lighting, exchanges anong characters were fraught but organic, their actions plausible within both the opera’s specific dramatic situations and its evocation of the Zeitgeist of 1950s Washington. Paul Carey’s costume designs and James P. McGough’s wigs and makeup augmented Newbury’s attention to manifesting the score’s musical transitions in its physical presentation. Accentuating not the aspects of the opera’s story that some observers may find objectionable but the intrinsic universality of the characters and their circumstances, Newbury’s vision yielded a performance of immense emotional impact.

During his tenure with Virginia Opera, the company’s Artistic Director Adam Turner has exhibited noteworthy versatility, conducting acclaimed performances of standard-repertory and lesser-known works ranging from the effervescence of Rossini to the starkness of Kurt Weill. The focus on facilitating character development and comprehensible storytelling apparent in Turner’s conducting of Virginia Opera’s 2016 production of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer was heard to even greater advantage in this performance of Fellow Travelers. The sequence of scenes advanced with cinematic efficiency, each thread of the plot carefully spun and woven into the fabric of the story via tempi that suited indivudual scenes and the work’s cumulative flow. The Virginia Symphony Orchestra musicians played wonderfully under Turner’s leadership, realizing the gravity that the conductor sought to achieve in passages like the pulsing ostinato at the opera’s start. Employed much like the continuo in Baroque opera, Spears’s writing for the piano received fleet handling from Associate Conductor Brandon Eldredge. Bringing Fellow Travelers to Virginia Opera was unquestionably an act of advocacy, both for the opera itself and for the LGBTQ+ community that it honors, but the zeal that guided Turner’s conducting was musical, not political. In this performance, the opera was simply the song of Tim and Hawk, two very different people who happen to meet on a park bench and fall in love.

Cogs in the bureaucratic wheel: (from left to right) tenor Andres Acosta as Timothy Laughlin, baritone Kyle White as Tommy McIntyre, baritone Joshua Jeremiah as Senator McCarthy, and baritone John Fulton as Senator Porter in Virginia Opera’s 2023 production of Gregory Spears’s and Greg Pierce’s Fellow Travelers
[Photograph by Dave Pearson Photography, © by Virginia Opera]

The caliber of the vocal ensemble engaged by Virginia Opera for Fellow Travelers reflected the meticulous attention to musical and theatrical values with which the production was planned. In the rôles of Senator Potter’s assistant, the bookseller, the technician, and the party guest, bass Jeremy Harr sang lustrously, but it was as the French priest to whom Tim confesses his inability to suppress his love for Hawk that he was most memorable, the cleric’s unyielding disapprobation quaking in Harr’s voice. The reporter Tommy McIntyre, a friend of Senator Potter who schools Tim on the ways of Washington, was portrayed with conspiratorial collegiality and vocal suavity by baritone Kyle White. As Lucy, the flirtatious partygoer who becomes Hawk’s suburban-dwelling wife, soprano Kaileigh Riess sang appealingly, and baritone John Fulton voiced Spears’s and Pierce’s lines for Michigan Senator Charles E. Potter, General Arlie, and the bartender incisively.

Lending gravity to each word of the parts entrusted to him, baritone Joshua Jeremiah keenly differentiated his depictions of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, Estonian Frank, and the Interrogator, seeming to bring a unique, apt voice to each of them. The quintessential office gossip who makes all of her colleagues’ affairs her business, the secretary Miss Lightfoot was given unexpected depth by soprano Katrina Thurman, whose singing glistened even when the text that she sang was repulsive.

Ladies who listen: mezzo-soprano Katherine Pracht as Mary Johnson (left) and soprano Katrina Thurman as Miss Lightfoot (right) in Virginia Opera’s 2023 production of Gregory Spears’s and Greg Pierce’s Fellow Travelers
[Photograph by Dave Pearson Photography, © by Virginia Opera]

Hawkins Fuller’s assistant Mary Johnson is the opera’s steward of decency amidst conniving and opportunism, and in Virginia Opera’s Fellow Travelers mezzo-soprano Katherine Pracht crafted an exquisitely sympathetic portrayal of the pragmatic New Orleansian. From the start, this Mary’s genuine affection for Hawk was perceptible: it was no surprise that she once thought that he could be ‘the one’ for her. Equally unmistakable was the sincerity of Mary’s fondness and concern for Tim, communicated through tender, tenacious singing. The expressivity of Pracht’s account of ‘I worry—that’s all—about you, Timmy’ was wrenching, the glint of her upper register here and in the scene in which Mary reacts with horror to Hawk’s admission of denouncing Tim imparting the profundity of her feelings. The pain of her exit after Tim learned of Hawk’s betrayal was palpable, and the momentousness of Mary being the sole witness to Tim’s humiliation who did not turn away from him was poignantly conveyed. Wholly comfortable with the part’s difficult vocal writing, which sometimes recalls Gluck’s demanding music for heroines like Iphigénie and Alceste, Pracht melded unerring musicality with Classical poise, Mary’s self-reliance and compassion limned with incredible tonal beauty.

From the heart: tenor Andres Acosta as Timothy Laughlin in Virginia Opera’s 2023 production of Gregory Spears’s and Greg Pierce’s Fellow Travelers
[Photograph by Dave Pearson Photography, © by Virginia Opera]

In every scene in which he appeared, tenor Andres Acosta sang Spears’s music for the endearingly naïve writer Timothy Laughlin with youthful exuberance and technical fluency, his timbre sparkling throughout the rôle’s broad compass. Drinking milk and swinging his feet on the bench on which he first meets Hawk, Acosta’s Tim was sweetly boyish, his shy nervousness trembling in the voice. The contrast with the cascading passion of the Bermuda duet with Hawk and the resolve of his voicing of ‘Forgive me, Holy Father’ in the fifth scene was therefore all the more telling. Tim’s adoration of Hawk having supplanted his faith, his journey from infatuation to disenfranchisement and enlistment in the Army was gutting, Acosta’s unaffected singing of ‘I wasn’t enough’ in the rooftop scene devastating. The crying heard in the auditorium when Tim uttered ‘I feel like I never existed’ in the final scene was earned, the tenor’s voice colored by excruciating uncertainty. In truth, Acosta articulated Tim’s every word with clear emotional intent, though there were instances in which enunciation was sacrificed to emoting. Acosta’s performance was as much felt as it was sung and was felt as mesmerizingly as it was heard by the listener.

Benched desires: baritone Joseph Lattanzi as Hawkins Fuller (left) and tenor Andres Acosta as Timothy Laughlin (right) in Virginia Opera’s 2023 production of Gregory Spears’s and Greg Pierce’s Fellow Travelers
[Photograph by Dave Pearson Photography, © by Virginia Opera]

Reprising the rôle that he created in Cincinnati in 2016, baritone Joseph Lattanzi physically and vocally embodied the unignorable enchantment of Hawkins Fuller. No one-dimensional libertine, Hawk teased Tim with amiable cunning at their first meeting, his furtive glances at the quiet young man on the bench suggesting true interest mingled with carnal desire. His descriptions of the wonders of Bermuda also shimmered with feeling. Lattanzi persuasively depicted Hawk’s skill at playing the requisite part in every situation, whether manipulating his interrogator or courting Lucy. Only in his discourses with Mary were his emotions unguarded, touchingly revealing well-hidden vulnerability.

Reconciling with Tim after callously proposing that they supplement their liaison by engaging a third participant and reuniting after Tim’s military service in France, this Hawk was torn between love and fear, cruelly telling Tim of his honeymoon with Lucy in Bermuda. Heartbreakingly voiced by Lattanzi, the essence of Hawk’s emotional constitution was movingly manifested in the two small words with which he replied to Tim’s assertion of all-consuming love—‘same here.’ Truth finally penetrated the carefully-honed façade in Lattanzi’s stunning performance of the monologue ‘Our very own house, Skippy’ and, still more forcefully, when, responding to Tim’s feeling of never having existed, Lattanzi declaimed Hawk’s definitive ‘You did.’ The theater’s troublesome acoustic complicated projection of Hawk’s lowest notes, but the full range of the part was confidently traversed. Diligently following the map of Spears’s music, Lattanzi and his fellow travelers reached a devastating destination at which nothing was relevant except living and loving in the moment.