Houston Grand Opera turns away from the classics this week to stage a contemporary work about those living on the streets or in shelters.
Photo: Melissa Taylor
Instead, composer Jeremy Howard Beck and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann have created an 80-minute musical mosaic of Houston’s homeless community, both those experiencing homelessness and those serving them. Directed by Emily Wells and continuing tonight and Saturday afternoon, the remarkable opera brushes past the stereotypes and misperceptions attached to the homeless by putting an array of thoughtful, authentic voices onstage.
Fleischmann and Beck spent hours listening to their stories: the infirm older man who once dreamed of Bollywood stardom but now travels three miles on the Metrorail to use the restroom, the woman who lost her son to homelessness and never stopped searching for him, the 22-year-old who just spent his first night on the street, or the young shelter volunteer who “thought I’d have to hold my nose.
Much of Beck's score evokes the external environment in one way or another. As the opera opens at dawn, the music is ethereal, dreamy, almost ambient, working in harmony with Michael James Clark’s spare but effective lighting design.
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