can I get a witness

I don’t usually see the New York Times, so I am indebted to indefatigable linkmeister Sid Chen of The Standing Room for bringing to my attention the recent article on the new, or finally produced, operatic version of Elmer Gantry, with music by Robert Aldridge and a libretto by Herschel Garfein. It occurred to me that I might post something about it, since apparently I am one of the few people around who actually heard Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sing at least part of the role of Sister Sharon Falconer. I’ve often wondered what happened to the project since I heard the workshop back in 1992. Once the Internet blessed our lives, I would occasionally try to google some information, but rarely came up with much.

I had also wondered occasionally what happened to Composers in Red Sneakers, the composers’ collective in Boston that started around the time I moved there. The Times article mentioned that Aldridge was one of the original sneakers. I should dig out my old playbills and see if I heard anything by him at their concerts – for some reason I didn’t make the connection at the time. I sort of lost sight of the Red Sneaker group even before I moved out of Massachusetts (e-mail has since made it much easier to reach your potential audience), and I had assumed they had dissolved or otherwise imploded, as is the way of collectives. Turns out I was wrong – they’re still going strong, so good for them. I don’t know what they’re like now, but they were known back in the mid-1980s as a fun and informal new music group – this was back when being a fun and informal new music group was considered pretty much an oxymoron, or at least a bizarre and suspicious aberration. I’m not sure where exactly the name came from, but you got free admission to their concerts if you wore red Converse hightops. I had a pair and enjoyed new music, so I went several times. I think the concerts were usually at Memorial Hall on the Harvard campus.

The Elmer Gantry workshop was at the small C. Walsh Theatre at Suffolk University on Beacon Hill. According to my playbill, there were two performances, Thursday February 27 and Saturday February 29, 1992. I was at the Thursday performance. I know this for certain because I bought a libretto ($5) and had both composer and librettist sign it, and Garfein wrote the date. I wish Hunt Lieberson had been available to sign as well; I know there’s something silly about having people sign a piece of paper, which is why I rarely ask for autographs outside of formal signing sessions, but there’s probably some principle of sympathetic magic behind its appeal, and I wish I had had the chance to ask her – at least it would have given me the opportunity to say thank you to her.

I don’t remember where I heard about the workshop, though the Boston Globe seems the likely source. It was open to the public – I certainly couldn’t have gotten in otherwise. I talked some friends from work into going with me – the literary source might have held some interest (one of them actually had a Sinclair Lewis thing and collected editions of his work – not the author I would choose, but I respected it and found it kind of an endearingly offbeat choice), and these were people who were sort of edging into classical music and opera, and I’m sure they went because I said “You have to hear this woman.” I wasn’t really familiar with the lead, Vernon Hartman, but of the other singers Sharon Baker as Lulu Baines and Frank Kelley as Eddie Fislinger were familiar performers; I had often heard them with Lorraine Hunt (her name at the time).

There are two things I remember clearly about the performance. The first is this: The playbill said that the opera's opening scene would not be performed and the workshop would open with the second scene, and the libretto had only a synopsis of the first scene, and I believe either Aldridge or Garfein beforehand summarized the first scene and said that the faculty meeting we were about to see was actually the second scene of the opera, and despite all that, several people started off the post-performance discussion by saying they didn’t think the faculty meeting scene was the best choice as the first scene of the opera. The Times article implied a certain arrogance or at least bluntness on the part of Aldridge and Garfein, but I recall them being exceptionally courteous in the face of this evidence that the people who pay the least attention are always the first to voice their opinions. (By the way, the Times article isn’t quite correct in saying the workshop was of the first act – it was of portions of the first and second acts, and Aldridge and Garfein had a note in the playbill saying that “When complete, Elmer Gantry will be three hours long, in three acts.”)

The second thing I remember is of course Lorraine Hunt’s performance as the Aimee Semple McPherson avatar, Sister Sharon Falconer. While sorting through and organizing my boxes of playbills recently, I was surprised to see that I had heard Hunt as Nitocris, the king’s mother, in Handel’s Belshazzar. Imagine the luxury and folly of hearing her often enough to let some performances slip away from the mind. But others are particularly vivid in my memory (in Handel’s Giulio Cesare and Mozart’s Clemenza di Tito, for example), and one of them is the Elmer Gantry workshop. The Times article referred to a recording of her singing Sharon’s entrance aria. I hope it still exists and is released some day soon. No disrespect to the artist who ended up creating the role, but Hunt Lieberson’s peculiar spiritual intensity brought a special edge to the character – she might be an ordinary woman, she might be a charlatan, or, when you heard her sing, she really might be in direct contact with great powers sweeping through the starry skies, and it was all a matter of faith. The scene I remember most vividly had her crouched down in front of (possibly figurative) incense burners, her hands arabesqueing as if with the scented smoke, while she chanted and sang an incantation filled with deep, vibrant ululations. Afterwards one of my co-workers kept saying, “Oh my God! Oh my God! That thing she did with her voice!” Yep. Exactly. That thing she did with her voice.