Past Production Reviews
3On Site Opera revived what one hopes will become an annual production of Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors. In choosing settings for familiar and unfamiliar operas, On Site adds an intriguing dimension to the form. With Amahl, the location in the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen returns the opera to its original meaning. This is a season which celebrates loving kindness as the heart of the human experience.
In the music video, baritone Overton, wearing a black and red African-inspired robe (Jessica Jahn and Azalea Fairley’s gorgeous wardrobe designs cast rainbows all over town) strode deliberately through the sacred space, singing to the ghosts of these dead souls: William Grant Still’s elegiac “Grief,” a hymn by Virgil Corydon Taylor, and a hope-filled spiritual. The videos included text captions, made almost superfluous by Overton’s impeccable diction. The baritone’s honeyed tone and silken phrasing largely compensated for the sometimes tinny sound of the piano, and his stoic dignity almost belied the pain of the lyrics.
On Site Opera, dedicated to “the immersive and site-specific experience,” closes out a year of some of the more radical pandemic experiments with The Road We Came: Three Musical Walking Tours Exploring African Americans and Black Music History in New York City. The app-based itineraries take in Lower Manhattan (including the African Burial Ground National Monument), Midtown (from Hell’s Kitchen to the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall), and Harlem (cradle of that creative explosion known as a renaissance). Pop in your earbuds and let the map guide you from landmark to landmark for nutshell commentaries and interludes of song.
