West Edge Opera is known for quite unique programming—from rarely done works to unheard of works to familiar works done in a totally reimagined way… How do you two plan a season together? How does it begin?
Mark: Should I start?
Jonathan: Sure!
Mark: Well, we start with a template that we've been working under for more than a decade. A template that is based on the tastes and interests of Jonathan and me.
We start with the idea of looking for an early piece, which is a special love of mine—from Mozart's time and earlier. And then we look for a piece that might be from early 20th century up to the 1950s, 60s, even 70s, which is kind of a specialty of Jonathan's. And then we look for something contemporary-new, or that's been written in the past 20 years at maximum for our third piece.
That's where we start… And then from there, we’ve been known to deviate.
Jonathan: I would like to add that for any piece to even make the list of what we're interested in doing, there has to be something special about it.
Mark: Oh yes.
Jonathan: Yes, it has to be from a unique part of the repertoire. It has to be from an especially interesting composer. It has to have a rare slant on events, or an interesting question that is the central aspect of the piece.
And, it has to have a very particular color or atmosphere that draws you in as a listener. All the pieces that we look at are pieces that you would want to take a magnifying glass to, something that you want to get into because it has its own personality, its own specific lens on human affairs. Or, if it's a more well-known piece, it will be shown to advantage if looked through a particular lens that is very entertaining and interesting for our audience.
Mark: I would add that we also look for three pieces that contrast, that work together but don't have real similarities. We would never want to do two pieces that focus on the same theme - You'd agree with that, Jonathan?
Jonathan: Oh yes. There are companies that will do something like three pieces on Cinderella or pieces of Shakespeare, but that's not what we're looking for.
We'd rather have people say: I’m here for the early piece, but I gave the contemporary piece a try and liked it!
Erwartung and The Nightingale double-bill: A "Jonathan piece" and a "Mark piece."
So was there ever a time when one of you terribly wanted to do an opera in the season and the other one said: absolutely not, over my dead body, no way.
Jonathan: Yes, there were pieces like that, but we ended up doing them like Lulu. I said, I want to do Lulu. And Mark said, no way. And then we talked about it and Mark said -
Mark: No wait, hang on. And then I slept on it and was up in the middle of the night thinking about it and looking at it and said: Oh God, this is what we should do. We should stick our necks out and do this.
Mark: And so, when we did a Philip Glass piece, which is not really Jonathan’s taste, originally he was not so excited but I convinced Jonathan and we did it and it was a real success and we're now talking about another Philip Glass piece in the future. And Jonathan is saying ‘Okay…'
Jonathan: I've tried to put a glass ceiling on this opera company -
(collective groan)
The puns!
Mark: The puns.
But, vetoes are real. If either of us really vetoed something that would be real. Is there anything else that we've really disagreed on?
Jonathan: I wanted to do Erwartung.
Mark: That's right. And I said no for a long time because I didn't think a monodrama had a place in our main stage season. But then suddenly another short piece that I wanted to do (Stravinsky’s The Nightingale) paired with it really well. And I brought that to Jonathan and that was how we did it.
Legend of the Ring, 2010. (L-R) Jay Hunter Morris as Siegmund and Marie Plette as Sieglinde; Wotan (Richard Paul Fink) and the giants (Bojan Knezovic and Dean Peterson). Photos Ching Chang.
So how did this 2024 Summer Festival season come to be?
Mark: Well, it’s all centered around Nathaniel Stookey and Eisa Davis’ Bulrusher, which we've been working on for a very long time so it became the anchor for this season.
And then we had planned on Charpentier’s French baroque piece: David and Jonathan, which I would direct, but it proved to be outside the finances that we could handle this year because it's quite a large piece with chorus and dancers. So, we delayed it to next year. And then I thought about our history and I’d always kind of wanted to bring back the reduced Ring cycle that we've done now twice - it's one of the shows along the way that put our company on the map - a very early project that sort of cemented our working relationship, the two of us.
So, I felt like it was time. I knew The Legend of the Ring would be interesting to our audiences, and that it would be interesting for Jonathan to conduct again.
That meant we had a late 19th century piece, and the Bulrusher premier… So for the spot where David and Jonathan once was, we put in another piece that I've really, really been wanting to do - a much smaller piece, but epic - And that's Jacqueline by Luna Pearl Wolf and Royce Vavrek. Royce is a friend and Luna is a friend and the star is Marnie Breckenridge who is very well known to Bay Area audiences, so the stars kind of aligned. I brought it to Jonathan a couple years ago and he really liked it as well. We felt it was a West Edge piece.
Jonathan, what compelled you about Jacqueline?
Jonathan: This season, there were several pieces that were around us that we condensed to form this season. And seasons don't all get created the same way. Some, you make a list and you put the list together. But in this case, it was not that way. When Mark introduced me to Jacqueline and I looked at it, I thought: this is really interesting music with an interesting take on characters - very involving with personalities, very intimate - and at the same time, it's something that has a general wide-sweeping interest. Those are the ideas I think that make West Edge Opera repertoire.
It's almost our brand now that there are pieces that you're not going to think of right away as ‘West Edge’. Jacqueline is not well-known. If the pieces are very, very well-known, we tend to think: why should we produce it?
But Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
Jonathan: Yes but it is a new way of looking at Wagner.
Other companies, other composers, other groups have put together Wagner's ‘Ring’ in a reduced form - but nobody else besides David Seaman made this attempt to keep the dramatic cogency of the piece and to condense it in such that the story is there and the musical power is there and it’s not ‘Wagner's greatest hits’. It's very easy to take segments of the piece with just the orchestra and singers - to take seven or eight bits.
The Legend of the Ring is 200 bits because it's really telescoped. And this way of telescoping Wagner into a small space, I think, is almost emblematic of how Mark and I view our performances.
We take a big genre and telescope it into a small and still grand package.
Mark: Also having Sam Helfrich (Elizabeth Cree, Festival 2021) direct the production is the polar opposite of what we’ve done before. He's going to be looking at it from an absolutely different lens than I did. I looked at it from a more traditional place, though done in modern dress with projections.
But Sam is looking at it from a more human and family drama focus. I'm really excited about that.
Jonathan: And that perspective is true of Jacqueline too. It's a way of looking at a person's life that's not a ‘bio-pic’ but goes from the inside out - which are my favorite kind of pieces. I think Mark likes those pieces too.
Mark: And we have an audience that's hungry for these kinds of works. We are able to program like this because we have such a smart audience.
(Above) WEO Festival at Oakland 's 16th Street Station,
Pacific Pipe, and The Bruns
The world premiere of Bulrusher is this summer - the first commissioned and developed opera from soup to nuts by West Edge Opera. Is the company changing, or is this an extension of what you've always been doing?
Jonathan: Both.
Mark: Yes, it's both. I mean, like Jonathan will say often, this is not our first commission because this company came out of Berkeley Opera which did, in my memory, two commissions. But, that feels like ancient history at this point because the company is such a different company than it was back then, performing at Julia Morgan Theater.
As West Edge Opera has become known for doing second productions of new works, and being connected to so many composers, commissioning and developing new opera was bound to happen. And, the pandemic really gave us the silver lining of the space to actually make the start. We now have such great connections to so many composers that it was a natural move. And then when we discovered that there was interest from funding sources - individuals, foundations, other companies signing on as co-producers - everything fell into place.
Jonathan: I would like to say that our move into commissioning and doing ‘first run’ of operas did not come directly. It wasn't something where we said: let's raise some money and do a new opera.” We did have the Aperture Project during the lock-downs which was a seed project, so these efforts have grown out of a seed - but that seed itself came from a point of view that the company has had for a long time.
Final question… You two have produced opera in some of the most unlikely venues: train stations, pipe warehouses, punk rock clubs…What is it about the Oakland Scottish Rite that makes you stay?
Mark: Well, for one, the space still has a ‘West Edge funkiness’ to it, an adventurousness to it. And, there is theatricality to it. The Scottish Rite Masons are theatrical people. They built an actual stage! Not that we use it—
Jonathan: (Chuckling)
Mark: They love us being there. There are rehearsal rooms so we are able to do our entire summer operation in one place, rather than how we used to be all over town rehearsing. And we now aren’t dealing with some sort of warehouse where the landlords didn't really get what we were doing and while maybe intrigued, they were ultimately not very cooperative.
The people that run the Scottish Rite have really made it possible for us to do what it takes to make opera. There are dressing rooms whereas before we were in, you know, tents. And there are bathrooms whereas before we had porta-potties. There is electricity instead of a generator, but still there is a kind of adventurous feel that has become part of who we are.
Jonathan: I would say we've moved from places where the initial reaction would be: Oh, we can't do opera here! to a place where now we say: Oh, could we do opera here?
Mark: (laughing) Yes, that’s right.
Jonathan: The excitement of taking a place that is forbidding, that is to say that presents many challenges, that process of bringing it to heel, of turning it into ‘opera workable’ is very exciting but doing it year after year takes its toll.
But I will say also that the past has sharpened the company's tools. We now have a tool chest for taking any space and making it into a really good presentation space that is very well stocked. We can take a place and, with time, tame it for our purposes.
From port-a-potties and generators to The Oakland Scottish Rite Center, WEO Festival's solution to
"Can we do opera here?"
Do you feel like the OSRC makes things more theatrically possible?
Mark: Well, we don't have to fight against the space. So, in that sense, yes. But it still takes imagination. We still fight against the space a little bit because we have to change it for our needs rather than the use the Masons intended.
That means there are things involving lighting and scenery that we have to sometimes compromise on, or explain to our designers that there are parameters involved that wouldn't exist in a large, traditional opera house.
But, we have been able to improve sightlines from previous venues and we have a standard style of orchestra pit now. And there are many advantages of saving the time and energy that in the past we'd spent creating new spaces every year.
Jonathan: Right, before if there were problems with the acoustics the only solution was go somewhere else. Now the solution is: work with what's there because we can adapt to make our acoustics work. So we can take that time and better consider our 2024 season - another in a long line of well-balanced programs, with a variety and interesting collections that you really will not find anywhere else.
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