Dead Man Walking by Jake Heggie
Fort Worth Opera, May, 2, 9 2009
Bass Performance Hall
Review by Dean Cassella

The Fort Opera Festival’s current production of Dead Man Walking, a relatively new (2006) work, has everything that one could hope for in an opera performance except one. The libretto, based on the memoir of a nun, Sister Helen Prejean, who counseled Patrick Sonnier (Joseph De Rocher in the opera), an inmate placed on death row for the brutal rape and murder of a teenage girl and her boyfriend, is riveting and thought-provoking.

Composer Jake Heggie has a profound gift for orchestration, made evident from the first bars of the prelude. The sets perfectly capture the bleak and somber atmosphere called for by the subject. The singers and musicians delivered a powerful, resonant performance worthy of the best halls in North America.

What is missing is melody.

Although I try not to be close-minded about these things, I do tend to approach new operas with a bit of suspicion. We are, for all intents and purposes, still living in the post-Wagnerian world when it comes to opera, and the last serious exemplar of tonal melody (who was himself half-Wagnerian) was Puccini. I actually love Wagner’s works, but I am one of those who believe that the great master set opera down a path that eventually stripped away the medium’s most enduring qualities, qualities at which Wagner himself excelled, despite his (often spectacularly successful) innovations.

Dead Man Walking narrates the last few weeks in the life of a man condemned to die by lethal injection in a Louisiana prison. Amidst the ordeal of his final appeal and last meetings with his mother and brothers, he develops a relationship with a nun who wrote letters to him, presumably under the Christian injunction to comfort those in prison. Through his relationship with Sister Prejean, he eventually comes to accept responsibility for his crime. The final scene—his execution—is performed in absolute silence as he is strapped to a table and hooked up to a machine that administers the poison. The humming of the machine is harrowing, as was the reenactment of the rape in murder at the beginning of Act I.

The melodies throughout are almost entirely dissonant (but in a mild way) except for a Christian hymn sung by the nun in her first appearance. One could almost think of this music as her leitmotiv—or that of “hope”. Although one could argue that this bleak subject matter calls for such a harmonic treatment, and it does, in fact, work most of the time, I nonetheless believe that the work’s impact would have been greater if the dissonance was balanced by some consonance. Rigoletto, after all, deals with some very dark and seedy subject matter, and even has its own version of De Rocher in the person of Sparafucile. Yet that work contains some of the most powerful song in the whole standard repertoire. Another interesting point of comparison is Carmen, the work which began this season’s Fort Worth Festival. As was pointed out in the program, Carmen caused some problems for its original audience because such unsavory characters were singing such beautiful melodies. In Dead Man Walking, scenes which included De Rocher’s mother, either pleading to the parole board to spare her son’s life, or bidding goodbye to him just before he was escorted to the death chamber, were crying out for even a touch of the sentimentality that made opera the art form that it is. Had Heggie used song-like melody, the impact of De Rocher’s execution would have been three-fold.

Bass Baritone Daniel Okulitch, most recently seen locally in the lead role in Dallas Opera’s Marriage of Figaro last fall, gave an outstanding performance as De Rocher, and his loud, edgy voice captured the character perfectly. He also gave a partial reprise of his recent nude scene in Paris/L.A’s The Fly although this time he only strips down to his tighty whities. But the loss of genitalia shock value is made up for by the large number of tattoos Okulitch sports for the role. So far as I can tell, the operatic  ”naked thing” got its start in the late 80’s with Sir Peter Hall casting his wife, Maria Ewing, in the title role of Strauss’ Salome, wherein she takes it all off during the Dance of the Seven Veils, something that has of late seemed almost de rigeur.

Speaking of nudity, the Fort Worth Opera website gave one of those “nudity and mature themes” warnings that usually turns out to be a type of lurid promotion. This was not the case here, because the proviso referred not to Okulitch, but rather to the rape/murder at the beginning of Act I. Although the stage was so dark that it was hard to tell just how much covering the actors had, it was disturbing, if only because the simulation was being done with live people, rather than filtered through a projector lens or monitor. In any case, there was nothing erotic about it (unless you are as depraved as De Rocher).

Prima donna Robin Redmon played the role of Sister Prejean in a very prosaic, low-key way that makes sense, given the character. Her powerful, lovely singing, however, was anything but prosaic.

In conclusion, I believe that Dead Man Walking is a worthwhile experiment, and certainly was worth the time and effort to see. I would encourage others to give it a chance in future productions. Attending the show with me was someone who has active interest in classical music, but relatively little sympathy for modern composition. Despite her initial reservations, she found the production well worth seeing.

But I still wonder if I will ever get to see a new opera in my lifetime that embraces, rather than avoids, soaring melody and song.