FORCED OUT BY FLOODING, HOUSTON’S OPERA GETS ON WITH THE SHOW
Come hell or high water, stage performers from the ‘can do city’ are determined that the devastating Hurricane Harvey won’t defeat them
The big sets had to be jettisoned. The shadow-play in the production was overhauled. The conductor was forced to lead with her back to the singers. But the show went on. Friday evening brought the sixth game of the New York Yankees-Houston Astros playoff series to Minute Maid Park. And a block from the stadium, Houston Grand Opera, forced out of its home in the Wortham Theater Center by ruinous flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey, opened its season with Verdi’s La Traviata in an unlikely makeshift auditorium: Exhibit Hall A3, renamed the HGO Resilience Theater, in the George R Brown Convention Center.
Residents of a city ravaged by Harvey less than two months ago need all the diversion they can get, and Houstonians had a hard choice last weekend. Mayor Sylvester Turner opted for Traviata on Friday, and his appearance beforehand drew a raucous ovation.
“I chose to pass up being at the stadium tonight,” he told the audience. “The Astros will do their business and be back to play again.”
As New Yorkers know too well, he was right. Now the team will continue to disrupt Houston’s already disrupted opera season through the World Series.
Harvey swept into Houston on Aug 25 and stayed for days, causing at least 60 deaths and delivering 1.3m of rain and untold devastation. The numbers are staggering. By current estimates, the damages to Texas, mostly this city, could reach US$180 billion.
The Wortham Theater Center, home to Houston Grand Opera and Houston Ballet, was flooded not only in the basement, where its mechanical and electrical fixtures reside, but also in its main auditorium, the Brown Theater, up to and beyond its stage level.
“A lot of water came in,” Perryn Leech, the opera company’s managing director, said flatly with exquisite understatement. Hundreds of millions of gallons surged through the loading docks at the Wortham, easily overcoming a retaining wall built in response to flooding from Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, and filled an underground parking lot, the basement and parts of the auditoriums.
The building is now festooned with air-conditioning ducts to dry it out, a process that is expected to take another month. Both Brown Theater and the smaller Cullen Theater will be closed at least until May, essentially the whole season.
After a quick search, Houston Grand Opera gained access to the large exhibit hall in the convention center, shortly after the 10,000 evacuees sheltered there had left the building. (The convention center, the Wortham and Jones Hall, the home of the Houston Symphony, are all owned by the city and administered by a corporation called Houston First.) Then the opera’s technical crew created an auditorium space with 1,700 seats (Brown Theater has 2,200), dressing rooms and a lobby, using tall, heavy curtains.
There is, however, no fly space to hang big sets, nor an orchestra pit or sound-reflecting wall. “We knew it would be a compromise,” said Patrick Summers, the company’s artistic and music director.
The orchestra had to be shunted behind the stage, with the conductor facing away from the singers. Under these circumstances, a major star of La Traviata was Kim Eun-sun, a young Korean conductor making her North American debut, who led the performance with great sensitivity and flexibility as another conductor, Peter Pasztor, relayed her beat in front of the stage for crowd scenes.
The revival of Julius Caesar (sung in Italian but played in a 1920s Hollywood setting) will tell further tales. It features a stellar cast, led by Anthony Roth Costanzo as Caesar, Heidi Stober as Cleopatra and Stephanie Blythe as Cornelia.
Unlike the large-scale Traviata, which came with its own raked wooden stage, Julius Caesar is a smaller production, to be acted on the bare concrete floor. After tests last week, it was decided that judicious amplification would be needed to give the voices sufficient heft.
The Houston Symphony, heard on Saturday, required much less experimentation in its return to Jones Hall, undoubtedly to the relief of all.
The orchestra, which lost much of its music library to flooding from Tropical Storm Allison, including scores annotated by many maestros over the decades, has since raised the library four stories. Harvey affected offices and communications, but nothing directly related to performances.
Matthew Halls conducted elegant performances of symphonies by Schubert ( No. 5) and Mozart ( No. 41), with just the slightest bit of rust in the playing. And Johannes Moser gave a commanding, sometimes playful account of Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C — the opening theme of Schumann’s Cello Concerto just happened to drop by in a cadenza — and added the Allemande from Bach’s First Cello Suite as a lovely encore.
Hurricane damages, it should be noted, have not been confined to institutions but have also acutely burdened individuals. Both the Houston Grand Opera and the Houston Symphony have set up relief funds for staff members and musicians who lost homes, cars or other assets.
The opera has collected $175,000 — $100,000 to defray the company’s losses and $65,000 to go to 12 members who applied for assistance. The symphony has raised more than $100,000 to be distributed to 17 afflicted staff members and players. The current catchphrase for what Mayor Turner called this “can-do city” — “Houston Strong” — evidently applies to more than just baseball.