What a poignant time to watch this work. I have known about the amazing Tony Kushner play, Angels in America for a long time and have loved it’s amazing ability to marry real life characters (if you don’t know about Roy Cohn, have a read it’s fascinating), this magical bizarre dream world, realism, religion and poetry into an epic celebration of the power of humanity and the growing liberation of queer people as members of the human race.
Stepping into watching the operatic version of the play, I had some apprehension in case it was a similar experience to Alice In Wonderland, where my expectation of the work and knowledge of the source material led me to be very disappointed. But luckily I wasn’t. The shimmering, dreamlike music that pours throughout the score was exquisite and mated the dreamlike, cheekiness of the libretto. The original 7.5 hour play is condensed, I think quite well, into 2.5 hours of opera. The level of emotional directness opera can deliver gives you a directness and immediacy that words can’t give you. In the operatic version they steer away from a of the political elements of the play and just focus more on the character. But through that you still get a really genuine vision of New York City in the early 90s and the plight of queer people, who only recently have received close to the same rights as straight members of the community.
At the centre of the work is the power of death, in the form of AIDS. Watching this poetry of death, with people experiencing visions and predictions of the future world unfolding before them, my thoughts quickly fell onto what we’re experiencing with Covid19, and how will we attempt to depict the current epidemic in poetical terms and what can it mean for humanity. The injustices faced by many of the characters in Angels in America rang so true with so many of the difficulties we face with Covid19. Angels in America is almost seeped in the uncertainty of the future; the future of those suffering with AIDS, the challenge and transformation this put against religion as the world became more progressive and the prospect of a huge, plague and the fall of the atheist Soviet empire.
One aspect of this opera, and perhaps the original production and cast that I watched contributed to, was the depth and breadth of the characters I saw on stage. So often with opera, and especially new opera, I find it so hard to get more than just the music. Acting, as we know, is often the second cousin to the singing in opera performance, but this work really provided me with rich, nuanced and big characters. Perhaps it also had to do with the large sections of the score that were spoken and not sung, or spoken in a rhythmic speaking type technique. The text setting was also generally in the middle range of the singers, closer to their speaking voice and more easier to understand, except for the angels who were more operatic and otherworldly. This perhaps helped push the real focus I felt on text. And it should be noted the amazing quality of the english text setting, and done by someone for whom the language was a second one to them!
I would love love love to see this done in Australia. We have such amazing talent for a work like this. Alas I don’t see any of our major companies taking that risk anytime soon.