When adapting any property as a musical, the first question to ask is, “Why does the work need songs?” That’s Stephen Sondheim talking, pertinently and likely more than once. It’s a query far too many composers and lyricists fail to consider these days when anything successful or even passable is targeted as fair game for musicalization.
The same question ought to be posed about adapting properties as operas, which leads to Ricky Ian Gordon’s and Lynn Nottage’s adaptation of her award-winning Intimate Apparel as part of the Metropolitan Opera House-Lincoln Center Theater commission program.
Giving those Intimate Apparel-opera-involved some credit, they undoubtedly did assign the planned enterprise some thought, but not early enough. The result: Even if the transition from stage play to opera does rise to emotional heights in its second act, the achievement is insufficient.
Curiously enough, when Nottage was thinking about what would become Intimate Apparel, she apparently imagined it as an opera, then decided she knew less about the form than she should. She settled for the play format and produced something not only smart but moving in its depiction of a talented immigrant seamstress learning through adversity how to get on with her life. The work premiered in 2003 and opened off-Broadway in 2004 to strong reviews.
Esther Mills (Kearstin Piper Brown) has been at her sewing machine for years, putting money aside so’s to open her own parlor. Yet, acquiring wealthy patrons among her 1905 Manhattan clientele, she hasn’t had any romantic attachments. Though illiterate, she begins a correspondence, penned by others, with Panama Canal laborer George Armstrong (Justin Austin).
His letters are so beguiling that when he proposes marriage, she quickly says yes. After he arrives and the knot is tied, it proves to be loose. Esther almost immediately realizes George isn’t the man his letters suggest he is. A womanizer who runs through savings that Esther has kept hidden in a quilt, he turns out not to have written those letters. (Yes, Intimate Apparel has two characters reminiscent of Cyrano and Christian in Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.)
Through act two George makes a play for Esther’s pal Mayme (Krysty Swann), while Esther, brought to her senses, realizes her heart belongs to Mr. Marks (Arnold Livingston Gets), a Hassidic Jew from whom she buys her fabrics. They understand, however, that It’s not a possible 1905 alliance.
When these affairs begin crossing, Gordon hits something of an impactful stride. Esther and George robustly sing and then repeat the phrase “I come here so the story will be different,” a sentiment the other lover-wannabes reiterate.
Nothing like these imploring strains surface in act one. There, Gordon mostly offers generically operatic recitative, Italian style. And by the act’s close, patrons may decide nothing has engaged, much less moved, them. They’re bored with the music (played skillfully by pianists Nathaniel LaNasa and Brent Funderburk, under Steven Osgood’s conducting).
Worse than that, audience members familiar with the unaltered intimate Apparel could begin to wonder what they previously liked about it. Nottage’s strengths in examining the lives of various Manhattanites as the Gilded Age was wrapping up is far from tiresome history. Here it registers as a drag. Those new to Nottage’s perceptive view of famous as well as anonymous New Yorkers could wonder what was there to begin with.
Impressively in its favor, this Intimate Apparel is beautifully sung throughout by each of its focal players: Brown, Austin and Gets foremost, but also Adrienne Danrich as Esther’s landlady Mrs. Dickson, Jasmine Muhammad as Esther’s frenemy Corrina Mae, and Naomi Louisa O’Connell as society matron Mrs. Van Buran, who takes a very forward liking to Esther. Bravos and bravas to them all. (Incidentally, Gets tries on a Yiddish-inflected accent but inconsistently.)
To Nottage’s original dramatis personae, Gordon adds a chorus. The singing they do is spare and often unintelligible. (Supertitles help, sometimes for the soloists, too.) The chorus does so relatively little they eventually give the impression they’re primarily employed to roll furniture on and off Michael Yeargan’s set.
Illuminated by Jennifer Tipton, it’s a set of various beds, a desk, a gambling table, an all-purpose door, and sewing-machine, Director Bartlett Sher, a prized Met-LCT veteran toiling away here, keeps the set spinning carousel-like on the much-worked (overworked?) Mitzi Newhouse turntable. The costumes are thanks to designer Catherine Zuber, who also made Esther’s clothes look so good off-Broadway.
So, what about Intimate Apparel play and opera? As an opportunity to show off voices, the opera version could have a future. But a bet on the play remaining in greater production demand would probably not go awry.
