Bringing Broadway to the opera house….

Every so often opera houses try to get hip and invite pop writers across the threshold: NYCO are set to do Rufus Wainwright’s Manchester International Festival commission Prima Donna next year, and Damon Albarn’s Monkey (also originally premiered via the MIF) has come to the Royal Opera House.

But last night NYCO brought Stephen Schwartz, one of Broadway’s most successful living composers, into the room, too, for the New York premiere of Seance on a Wet Afternoon, an obsessively dark and insinuatingly melodic opera that revolves around a medium and child kidnap, based on a 1961 novel that was subsequently filmed by Bryan Forbes in 1964. The riveting result is both tense and intense, and stunning staged by Scott Schwartz (the composer’s son) with a magnificent performance from Lauren Flanigan as the psychic.

I doubt that the Wicked crowd who regularly make that show the top-grossing musical on Broadway will want to rush to see this, but if it’s less fun than that musical behemoth, it’s also a lot more interesting. Schwartz, who also of course wrote Godspell (currently coincidentally being revived at London’s Union Theatre, and I can’t wait to see when I get back next week) and Pippin (one of my all-time favourite scores), has had one of Broadway’s oddest careers: those early shows were written in the 70s when he was still in his twenties, and then he was consigned to Broadway oblivion for most of the 80s and 90s with a series of flops that included The Baker’s Wife (a show that toured with Patti LuPone but never made it to Broadway) and Children of Eden in the West End. But then he bounced back dynamically with Wicked and the rest is now history. Tomorrow, in fact, NYCO are paying him the ultimate compliment of a benefit evening tribute show, Defying Gravity: The Music of Stephen Schwartz, whose line-up includes original Wicked star Kristin Chenoweth and one of my cabaret favourites Ann Hampton Callaway. (Of course I am going to be there!)

But Seance on a Wet Afternoon finds him, at the age of 63, stretching his artistic template yet again, and making fresh discoveries along the way. While the Broadway machine is a big beast that devours its young, as his own career has been testament to, and is a Darwinian struggle for survival to remain part of the game in, he has had to learn new ways of working in opera. In a programme note, he explains that his writing process had to be markedly different: unlike in a musical where the characters’ musical and dramatic voices emerge together as book and score are written side-by-side, here he discovered “I needed to have a complete libretto before I could start composing.”

He goes on to point out, “Needless to say, the libretto changed as I composed the music, but not nearly as much as with a musical. Another difference was that in writing the score for a musical, I tend to take the path of least resistance - that is, I start with the song that is clearest to me and sort of work piecemeal for a while until the overall score starts to emerge. I found that I couldn’t do that with the opera. Other than developing a few musical motifs, I had to write sequentially - start at the beginning and write through to the end.”

Again, new opera commissions, he says, “tend to be delivered to the companies presenting them as faits accompli, whereas musical theatre projects usually go through a series of readings, workshops, tryout productions and previews before their official premieres.” And he goes on, “When I heard about a composer who delivered his finished opera score at the first rehearsal and expected never to change a word or note, my only thought was: he’s a braver man than I.”

Seance on a Wet Afternoon was duly subjected to “a development process closer to the way I work on a new piece of musical theatre”, with staged readings and orchestral readings along the way. The opera and musical worlds have a lot to learn from each other; but while musical theatre can take the long view of a show’s development to know that will pay back eventually, as Wicked proves every week as the top grossing show on Broadway, there’s no such luxury to an opera run. Seance has been booked for a total run of 10 performances in the next two weeks. Catch it while you can. (And a musical version of another film Catch Me If You Can is what I’m seeing tonight!)