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“People have always come to California with the idea of getting rich quickly,” he says. While the opera is firmly rooted in the 19th century, Sellars sees it as a piece with clear 21st century resonance of “the project and the possibility of California as this amazing multicultural society.” The opera also implicitly touches on “what the nightmare of California is,” says Sellars, “with the world’s largest prison system and all the inequality.”Īnd then there’s the through line from the Gold Rush to Silicon Valley. The “Girls” cast of characters includes a black cowboy, a Chinese prostitute and the famed Irish-born “Spanish dancer” Lola Montez. “We’re telling a real American story,” he says, with all the combustive variety of the Gold Rush itself. In writing and stitching together new melodies, the composer fashioned something Sellars compares to the celebrated Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill works “The Threepenny Opera” and “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” - without some of the ironic “quotation marks,” as the director puts it. While scuttling the generic tunes (“Camptown Races,” “Pop Goes the Weasel”), Adams seized on the song texts. Key breakthroughs came with “The Shirley Letters,” an eloquent and atmospherically rich epistolary trove written by a doctor’s wife (who appears as a character in the opera), and a collection of miners’ songs Sellars purchased from a rare book dealer. Sellars read or consulted some 80 works of California history. While an offer to stage Puccini’s 1910 California Gold Rush opera “The Girl of the West” may have planted a distant seed for Sellars, the new Adams-composed work has no relation to it. “Almost every word,” says Sellars, who is credited with constructing the libretto, “is right from the actual sources.”Ĭommissioned by former San Francisco Opera General Director David Gockley, “Girls” took shape after a long period of research. The historical accuracy is central to “Girls of the Golden West,” its story and language drawn directly from period letters, diaries, speeches, poetry and songs. It’s Josefa Segovia, the barmaid portrayed by Bridges in the opera, who was hanged in Downieville on July 5, 1851, after stabbing to death an abusive suitor. “Everyone was in tears.”įor anyone conversant with California Gold Rush history, the name of the victim will ring an ominously familiar bell. “We were all devastated,” Sellars says quietly. That wasn’t the case the night before, he recalls, when the cast rehearsed a lynching scene that comes late in the second act. “You’re not taking one second of his bull-.”įorty minutes later, on a rehearsal break, Sellars looks exhilarated rather than spent by what he and the performers have just been through.
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“Let him have it right back,” he says to Bridges, who nods and studies the ground at her feet a moment, as if gathering her strength. But the director is also setting the power-balance wheels spinning in contrary directions. “I want you to take her by the arm,” he suggests to Appleby, “and walk her around as if the two of you are going to have the most adorable kids.”įor an observer, it’s like watching a sexual assault take form in deliberate, stop-and-start slow motion. “This is total Trump stuff.” Moments later, the director has a new, insidiously cozy idea.
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“He’s going to push every one of your buttons,” he says.