Townsend had previously performed at Opera Philadelphia in their 2019 production of Sergei Prokofiev’s The Love of Three Oranges. The Juilliard graduate has also performed at LA Opera in Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore and in their successful streaming production of The Anonymous Lover by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges.

Walker used four stanzas from Walt Whitman’s poem When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d for this work. Whitman wrote the poem as an elegy for Abraham Lincoln after the president’s assassination.

Two weeks before her first-ever performance of Lilacs Townsend and I spoke via Zoom. What follows are excerpts from that conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

What resonance does Lilacs have for you personally?

I think the piece is a semblance of how we deal with grief and how we expand on that. For me it brings up a lot of how we actually deal with grief and the acceptance of passing and the acceptance of death. I think for me it’s a very beautiful kind of journey and the struggle of how you deal with grief and how it hits you – as it hits everyone differently.

Given everything the world has experienced for the last two years do you think there’s a topicality today to be found in Lilacs?

We’ve basically been shut down for two years. So many lives have been lost from COVID, from disasters, from all kinds of things. So I think Lilacs could be that acceptance of, not necessarily being happy about loss, but accepting that that is a natural part of life, unfortunately, and kind of figuring out how we deal with that and how we take steps to move forward from dealing with loss.

What are your challenges in singing this piece?

The hardest thing about singing this is the rhythms. Vocally it’s not really that challenging for me, but rhythmically, it’s more challenging than anything that I’ve sung. This is like the most like rhythmic kind of interesting mix meter things that I’ve ever sung. 

Walker described some of his work as have been influenced by jazz, but that it definitely is not jazz. How do you see Lilacs within that description?

It’s very syncopated and I can figure those out. But it’s the way that it intermingles with the orchestra. It’s so cool, but also so unexpected. So it’s not really intuitive. It’s like the things that you think are going to happen don’t happen. So it’s really cool, but it’s really challenging.

Walker wrote this piece as a tribute to Black lyric tenor Roland Hayes who broke ground in the 1930s for his work as a singer. Is Hayes an inspiration for you? How do you acknowledge the shoulders of those who came before you?

Honestly in classical music there weren’t many African-Americans to look up to. He was one of those trailblazing artists and we are in debt to the people that came before us. I think for me it’s just to be true to ourselves and never trying to conform to what we think we need to be.

You didn’t set out to be an opera singer. In fact, you got your Bachelor’s Degree in Music as an instrumentalist, not a singer. Since you have both skills have you considered combining them? I believe there are few opera singers who can accompany themselves.

There is a clip of Erin Morley who I think was doing something for a Metropolitan Opera online gala that they had last year and she was accompanying herself and everyone was like, “Oh my God!” I have been thinking about doing something like that, but I have to get my piano skills back. I would love to do that. That sounds super cool. In addition to the classical pianist, I would also like to do more gospel music, church musician as well. I still tend to accompany myself when I’m singing gospel or jazz standards or anything like that. 

You are coming of age an interesting time for Black artists with more attention being paid to inclusion. George Walker wrote an essay for the New York Times in 1991 entitled Make Room for Black Classical Music. He bemoaned what he referred to as “tokenism” referring to the inclusion of music by Black composers in the small window that exists from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday through the end of Black History Month in February. How much do you think things have changed since he wrote that editorial? Is there room for improvement?

It’s half and half BUT I have to be positive because I do think we’ve come quite far. When I talk to my mom, who grew up in the ’60s, my grandfather made her and my uncle be the first to integrate a particular school in my hometown. To hear her talk about these things and say, ‘You guys, we can’t be this ungrateful. There are things that have really, really propelled and moved forward.”

But on the other hand, there are things that we’re still talking about in 2022. We can be appreciative of how far in society we’ve come in certain aspects but there’s still a lot of work to be done. And so I think I can be positive about being grateful about those certain things, but I still shouldn’t have to prove that I deserve to be. I still shouldn’t have to look over my shoulder and be like, am I just here because I’m Black or am I here because I’m talented? I tend to be the only black person in the room. I see that changing. As long as there is movement forward, I think we’ll be OK…hopefully. 

Note: Opera Philadelphia will be live-streaming the performance on Friday, January 21st at 8:00 PM ET. The performance will remain available for viewing through February 20th at www.operaphila.tv.

For details and tickets to either live performance, please go here.

Photo: Tiffany Townsend (Photo by Amanda Lynn Bottoms/Courtesy Opera Philadelphia)

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Cabaret – Celebration Theatre

Previews begin 5/25

Over the past two years, Celebration Theatre has had back-to-back hits with taking very large, splashy musicals (The Boy from Oz, Priscilla Queen of the Desert) and making them work in the intimate settings of their Hollywood theatre. Now they tackle the Kander & Ebb musical Cabaret. This production, much like the 1998 revival that starred Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson, is set in the Kit Kat Club. But for this production, director Michael Matthews is offering up a far more decadent and dirtier club than has been seen before. Almost every performance of the two previous musicals sold out, extended their runs and still sold out. So I ask you, what good is sitting all alone in your room?

Beauty and the Beast: Live in Concert to Film  – The Hollywood Bowl

May 25-26

Most films that get live orchestral treatment at the Hollywood Bowl don’t have songs. With these two performances of the Disney animated film classic, the memorable characters from the film will be voiced live by an all-star cast that includes Zooey Deschanel as “Belle,” Kelsey Grammer as “Lumiere,” Taye Diggs as “Gaston,” Rebel Wilson as “LeFou,” Jane Krakowski as “Mrs. Potts” and Anthony Evans as “Beast.” Michael Kosarin is conducting the orchestra. There are also a few special performances before the film.

Crossing – The Walis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

May 25-26

If you are interested in getting a good sense of what the future of classical music and opera will be in the years ahead, then checking out this chamber opera by Matthew Aucoin is an excellent place to start. The 28-year-old wrote Crossing about a period of time in poet Walt Whitman’s life in which he abandoned all the comforts of his life to tend to wounded soldiers in the hospital during the American Civil War.  These two performances are concert performances and not fully staged productions of Aucoin’s work. But they will give you an excellent look into his work and, by extension, one direction contemporary opera is heading. For more information on Crossing, check out our interview with Aucoin here.

Ann Hampton Callaway and Amanda McBroom – Catalina Bar & Grill

May 25-May 27

Last October singers Amanda McBroom and Ann Hampton Callaway brought their show Divalicious to the Segerstrom Center in Costa Mesa and also the Venetian Show Room at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Now it’s LA’s turn to see these two wonderful singers in the show where they work their magic on songs from the Great American Songbook and some of their own recordings. They will be joined by Music Director Michelle Brourman on the piano. These sisters are doing it for themselves.

Photo by Steve Sorokoff/Courtesy of BroadwayWorld.com

Schumann Focus: Symphony #4 and the Cello Concerto  – Walt Disney Concert Hall

May 26-27

The LA Philharmonic continues its journey through the symphonies of Robert Schumann with these two performances of the 4th Symphony. What makes the 4th Symphony (in D Minor) so unique is the four movements are played through without a break. This was unheard of at the time of its premiere. As with the earlier concerts this week, Sol Gabetta will be playing the Cello Concerto and Gustavo Dudamel is conducting.  Note that Saturday’s performance is a matinee.

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Crossing depicts a time in the life of poet Walt Whitman when he put his work aside and volunteered as a nurse helping with soldiers during the American Civil War. Baritone Rod Gilfry plays Whitman, a role he originated in the world premiere of this work in 2015.

I spoke with Aucoin by phone while he was working on an operatic adaptation of Sarah Ruhl’s 2003 play, Eurydice which will find its world premiere in a future LA Opera season.

What can we learn from this part of Walt Whitman’s life that you think is unique to what we know about other parts of his life and/or directly what we learn from his poetry?

It’s a crazy thing to do for a middle-aged guy who was living a pretty comfortable life in New York to drop everything and work for no money for three years in the most demanding and gruesome work imaginable. Whitman describes regularly seeing piles of amputated limbs. It wasn’t a pleasant place to be. What lead him to do this? What kept him there?  He didn’t plan on staying. He was visiting his brother and then his brother got better and release and Whitman stayed.

I doubted the purity of his motives. After all, here is a middle-aged gay man spending his days with all these 18-20 year olds. In the diaries he does record being on fairly intimate terms with them. I’m not suggesting he was some sort of predator. I think there was a personal need for him to be there. There are also signs of a mid-life crisis. He was a guy who kept reinventing himself. Being a nurse was just another invention of this chameleon of a human being.

Where do you take this story in Crossing?

What I wanted to do was paint this psychological portrait of Walt Whitman in this sort of purgatory. Nobody knows how long the war will go on. The patients don’t know if they will get out alive. Whitman doesn’t know why he’s stuck there. Of course we see the end of the war in the epic and what that does to Whitman. He has to confront that he’s in refuge there. It’s a fraught moment for both Whitman and the country.

When you were writing the libretto for Crossing you had to contend with a subject matter whose own poetry has been embraced and celebrated for more than a century. What influence did his style have on you and how daunting was waxing poetic about a poet?

Of course it was daunting and I started the process by setting a few Whitman poems to music just to be sure that I could. I actually think the vast majority of Whitman is essentially impossible to set to music. The lines are too long to sing in one breath a lot of the time. But I found a few poems of his such as The Sleepers and A Clear Midnight which did suggest music to me. That was comforting.

For the rest of the opera I didn’t actually quote much Whitman because the point here is not to show him in his poet/prophet mode so much as to show him as a complicated, tormented but sympathetic human being. So of course he speaks differently in conversation than he does in the poems.

In Leaves of Grass Whitman depicts his conflict and emotions about a gay affair and its aftermath. Was any of that work at all influential in the writing of Crossing?

No. But there are references to his sexuality through the poems. One that fascinates is in The Sleepers. The whole poem is about sleep as democratizing forces. Humanity is all the same when it sleeps. Whitman imagines himself as the only person who can’t sleep. He imagines walking and being this all-seeing eye that is doomed to be conscious. Then he has this dream where he switches gender – he imagines himself as a woman. It’s this bizarre confession. It blows my mind that this was published in the 1850s. He does fall in love in the opera with one solider who has his own secret. The kid snaps and calls him a “twisted old faggot,” but not in modern terms. The way Whitman responds is, I’m just trying to be everyone’s brother. I find that touching because that’s a s close as he could get to expressing sexual desires.

What makes Rod Gilfry the right person to have created this role?

Rod is one of the most lovable artists you will ever meet. He’s got this beautiful lyric baritone voice which as he has matured, it has a couple rough edges in the good sense. There’s a lot of experience in that voice. But he’s still, at heart, a sunny California dude. I met him when I was assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera working on Thomas Ades’ Tempest. Rod sung the role of Prospero a number of times. Through all the changes I’ve made to Crossing, I’ve kept tweaking it so it’s a tailor-made suit for him by now.

In your lecture about Whitman at Paine Hall, you talk about the “extraordinary decision to spend years of his life volunteering in Civil War hospitals.” What, in your own life, is the extraordinary decision you’ve had to make, whether personally or creatively?

I don’t think I’ve jumped off an equivalent ledge of security, except for the one living as a composer. That took some guts because you have to say no to a lot of the commercial machinery that makes our world tick. You have to be okay with standing outside of that. I used to play in a rock band and I loved it, but I couldn’t stand the creative limitations. In the classical music business we are up against economic realities every day. Part of the reason we are struggling is we are making decisions for artistic reasons and I think that’s something to celebrate, not just to bemoan the audiences are smaller. Yeah, it takes some effort to engage with this music.

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“I want the character you know at the end of the play to be different than who you met at the beginning,” says actor Thomas Sadoski of his goal, not just for Belleville in which he is currently appearing at the Pasadena Playhouse, but for all roles he tackles on stage. “Art is about growth and challenge. That’s what people come to see. They come to see humans challenged and grow and change and develop, not necessarily for the best.”

I spoke with Sadoski by phone during rehearsals for Belleville. The show officially opened on April 22nd and will continue through May 13th.  In Amy Herzog’s play, Zack (Sadoski) and Abby (Anna Camp) are an American couple living in the Belleville section of Paris. He has a job in medicine and she’s been battling some personal demons and trying to find her way. The only other people shown are their Senegalese neighbors Alioune (Moe Jeudy-Lamour) and Amina (Sharon Pierre-Louis.) Over the course of the play we see the dynamics in Zack and Abby’s relationship change based on the truth each is willing to own.

Sadoski, who appears in the television series Life in Pieces, has long been an admirer of playwright Amy Herzog (4000 Miles and Mary Jane). “I am a huge fan,” he says enthusiastically. “To even get to play with her work at all is thrilling to me. I think it’s just an exquisite play. It’s the theatre of humanity in the best way in that you are constantly switching alliances through the course of the play and constantly being asked to question the accuracy and integrity of the narrator you are listening to. I find that to be incredibly human and the most powerful art in our medium. That art that makes you question what the hell is going on and you start to recognize yourself in everybody.”

The alternating alliances mean that giving away too much of the play would be a disservice to the audience. But Sadoski is willing to talk about the different facets of Zack that get peeled away over the course of the play. “You don’t want to drop too many layers too soon. You don’t want to hold onto them to the end and dump them all simultaneously because that can be overwhelming and you lose the audience. But if you are doing it slowly and over the course of 90 minutes, it doesn’t give the audience any place to hide. You force them on the journey with you. It’s an intricate surgical process in terms of building a foundation of the character, an emotional life between two characters and then finding out where the cracks in the walls start to show.”

Before a production of Belleville that was done by Steppenwolf in Chicago, Herzog said in an interview about the play, “in all relationships there are lies that are allowed to exist.” I asked Sadoski if he agreed and, if so, did he think those lies were borne out of fear or an attempt to keep the relationship going.

“What’s the difference? If you are attempting to keep a relationship working by lying then you are doing it because you are terrified of the relationship going away. I think fear is the driving force. In terms of these two characters, Zack and Amy, it is the gasoline and the engine that drives that relationship. One of the beautiful things is you are given a counterpoint relationship of pure trust and that’s the relationship between Alioune and Amina. It is the story of two relationships, one that is profoundly broken and another that is based in kindness and honesty and trust.”

Amongst Sadoski’s theatre credits are Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves and reasons to be pretty by Neil LaBute. The latter playwright has found himself amongst those whose actions in the #MeToo era have been called into question. In fact, MCC Theatre, an important off-Broadway theatre, severed ties with LaBute. Rather than discuss whether or not the allegations are true, I asked Sadoski if it is important to be able to separate the artist from the art.

“That’s a really interesting question and it seems to be the question of the day. I’m able to separate art from the artist to a certain extent. If I come across an artist who is portraying abuse or portraying some sort of incredible hateful act, a painful act, in their art and engaging in it in real life, it becomes a little bit of a no-go for me. But I’m also willing to acknowledge that imperfect people can create tremendous things and that being able to appreciate Wagner or Picasso or the songs or poems of somebody whose beliefs or actions you might find distasteful, it all comes down to the Walt Whitman of it all. We all ‘contain multitudes.’ We have to see beyond black and white. My concern as an artist is if we only see black and white, then art is dead. There is no point in continuing. The whole point is to hold up man’s imperfections in front of each other and say ‘this is the experience, may we all learn. May we all experience through each other’s eyes and ears and hearts and souls.’ On some level that evaporates when you miss the piece for the maker.”

All photos by:  Philicia Endelman

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