“The Ballad of Baby Doe” is one of the most successful works of art ever launched in Colorado, and it’s a privilege to get to see it resurrected by Central City Opera, the company that dreamed it up 60 years ago.
Central City could not have imagined back in the day that composer Douglas Moore’s musical saga about the rise and fall of silver-mine magnate Horace Tabor and his two wives would go on to become a standard in the opera world. But the piece has had scores of imaginative reinventions over the years, stretching from San Francisco to New York, where it was a career defining role for the great American soprano Beverly Sills.
Still, it has remained the house opera in Central City and the company brings it back it about once a decade. It’s a homecoming, of sorts, but always a serious effort that reflects the current thinking about opera in whatever era it returns.
One thing that doesn’t change is Moore’s score, which is an easy-going and accessible creation that, by 20th century measures, is too demanding neither for the singers or the audience. The opera is known for a handful of tuneful arias that show off the vocal talents of the singer lucky enough to land the title part.
This time around it is soprano Anna Christy and she is particularly suited for Baby Doe Tabor, a Colorado legend remembered for possessing enough good looks and youthful charisma to lure the hapless Horace away from his first wife, Augusta. Plucky and doe-eyed by nature, Christy takes to the job organically, with a voice that mixes buoyant purity with complex emotion and gets her comfortably through some overly sweet passages. The final three minutes of this production, when Baby Doe laments her dying lover with gentle high notes, is one of the most memorable moments in Central City’s recent history.
And there’s equally effective casting in Grant Youngblood, as Horace, and Susanne Mentzer, as Augusta, both well-served by Timothy Myers’ sensitive conducting in the pit. The performers deliver familiar roles with a contemporary depth in their singing and a level of acting that makes it heart-wrenching to watch their common journey of ruin, caused by personal vanity as much as the failure of silver at the end of the 19th century.
The staging won’t be for everyone. Director Ken Cazan, a Central City regular who was behind the company’s excellent “Dead Man Walking” in 2014, imparts a darkness into the opera meant to explore the deeper parts of the title character’s psyche. There are subconscious flashes forward into her life, set long after the opera ends, manifested by a mysterious Ghost of Baby Doe Future character that lingers on the edge of the action.
It’s all a little murkier than it might be, as are the series of colorless projections of real Colorado scenery that serve as sets, standing in for real sets that might have actually recreated the Tabor Opera House or other fanciful Leadville locations. They may be meant as psychological enhancements but they are often physical distractions. Projections have real power in today’s opera to increase the action and palette of a production and to open up landscapes. These hue-drained backdrops make things smaller and feel distant from the flesh-and-blood actors doing their work.
That said, they do add a dose of local history to the show, grounding a true story in a pictorial reality. Lovers of Colorado history will appreciate them and anyone who likes opera served up in something other than the same-old, same-old way will probably think they are clever.
As for the Moore’s opera, it stands the test of time in 2016. It’s a much better work of art in its second half than its first, coming into its own only when the composer, along with librettist John LaTouche, finally let go of reality toward the end and take the audience on a mind-bending journey into Horace’s final, delirious hallucinations. Finally, we get to see the emotional depth of his downfall as a human being and the hopelessness of his legacy as a businessman. This sort of descent into a wild, sonic madness defines 20th century opera and, despite a considerable wait, “Baby Doe” delivers the goods.
Central City has an obligation to the work now. Not just to re-stage it as nostalgia but to bring new life to it with every outing. That happens with this production; it tries to be something new. And because of that, the privilege of seeing it lies in the present and not in the past.
Central City Opera’s 2016 season runs through Aug. 7 at various locations. For tickets and info, go to centralcityopera.org or call 303-292-6700.
