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Welcome to the Vera of Las Vegas Website. This site is a resource for presenters of the opera, as well as for fans and for Vera's extended family of present, past casts and production teams.

Playbill Magazine
March 19, 2006
Daron Hagen, in his collaborations with the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, has moved boldly into the surrealist realm; Vera of Las Vegas [is the] lurid tale of two on-the-lam IRA irregulars stuck in Sin City for a layover, is a mélange of raunchily eclectic music and dazzling wordplay.

Original Vera of Las Vegas art from the New Yorker (c) The Irish Times
December 4, 2004
Opera Theatre Company The Helix, Daron Hagen - Vera of Las Vegas

`Catchiness' is not an issue you'll find much discussed in connection with
contemporary operas. But it was bouncing around in conversation as I left Thursday's performance of Daron Hagen's Vera of Las Vegas, an opera written in 1997, and now on its European premičre tour in a new Opera Theatre Company production by Annilese Miskimmon, writes Michael Dervan.

One of the major problems in many recent operas has to do with the difficulty composers experience in plausibly marrying their chosen texts to the musical style in which they want to write. Paul Muldoon's libretto for Vera is sharp and well-conceived, and Hagen seems to have made a clear decision not to get in its way. He's taken a polyglot approach to the music, and written it as a kind of mood-identifying background, sometimes in keeping with the words, but often deliriously, hilariously at odds with them, though in a way that manages to highlight them without undermining them. It's quite a clever ploy, even if Hagen's vocal lines do sometimes let the enterprise down, when they fall uncomfortably between the stools of the Broadway musical and sentimental song. Yet he's timed the work well. It's mostly brisk in pace, and plays for around an hour with no interval. Miskimmon's production, with a cyclorama-ish set by Neil Irish (and heaps of costume changes) and scene-setting video projections by Ciara Moore, hardly misses a trick in keeping things moving, as two IRA men, Taco and Dumdum, on the run as illegal immigrants in the US, are hunted and tracked by the immigration authorities. Individuals in the chase change sides, and the sexy lure of Vera herself leads on to a re-run of the most famous scene from Neil Jordan's The Crying Game, here played offstage, but causing totally unexpected consequences.

The opera is framed by sequences which make it clear that the action is in fact Taco's nightmare, after he has passed out during rough interrogation. The music, directed from keyboards with spirit by David Brophy, is really rather cheap. But that's how Hagen seems to want it, immediate, functional, often a bit sleazy. The singing of the main roles is spirited - Eugene Ginty as Taco, Alan Fairs as Dumdum, Charlotte Page as Doll, Jonathan Peter Kenny as the transvestite Vera - though things become a little stickier at the moments of greatest lyricism and earnestness. The multi-tasking chorus (Rebekah Coffey, Carolyn Dobbin, Shirley Keane, Bridget Knowles, Elizabeth Woods) are as vivacious and resourceful in their many assumptions as anyone could wish for.

The Times of London
VERA of LAS VEGAS EUROPEAN PREMIERE

November 25, 2004
By Robert Thicknesse

CONTEMPORARY opera? It’s enough to strike a chill into the soul: it parted company with the idea of entertainment a while back and one steels oneself for a gloomy experience of unremitting rigour.

So hooray for this work by the American composer Daron Hagen and the Ulster poet Paul Muldoon. It is billed as a “nightmare cabaret opera”, lasts a painless hour, was premiered last year in New York, and is a neat find by Ireland’s Opera Theatre Company, which is taking it on a short tour of the Republic before bringing it to Britain next year.

Sassy libretto and music fool about happily with genres. Two retired IRA boneheads, Taco and Dumdum, living illegally in New York, are pursued by Immigration and by two renegade MI5 officers. As they change planes at Las Vegas, the INS agent Doll tricks them into thinking they have won a free day on the tables, and sets them up with Vera, a transvestite lapdancer past his prime who Taco falls for.

It’s about dawning self-awareness and coming to terms with the past, and it raises plenty of piquancies without getting heavy. You wish you could hear more of the words: Muldoon’s libretto is anyway dense enough for a spoken play and should probably be cut by about half — it’s impossible to follow his long paragraphs, however nicely constructed, and then you can’t hear half of it. It’s not a problem of texture or scoring.

Hagen’s music, smoochily played by a cabaret quartet, blends idioms — neo-Gershwin, jazz, soft rock, Broadway — with soaring melodies that send the characters looping off in arias of self-revelation. He has a gift for pastiche and musical surrealism as well as a distinctive voice for moments where words and music coincide. If Vera feels somewhat inconsequential and anecdotal there is a reason: it is the central act of a planned full-length opera.

As the pair (Alan Fairs and Eugene Ginty) stumble through a cleverly painted Vegas their plight is commented on by a chorus of airhostesses and showgirls who do the operatic impossible of both looking and sounding good. Annilese Miskimmon directs with pace and wit, Linda Dobell moves everyone around brilliantly, and the set is neatly done. Jonathan Peter Kenny, as Aladdin Sane-lookalike Vera, and Charlotte Page as Doll stand out among the singers.

The New Yorker Magazine
CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY OPERA: “VERA OF LAS VEGAS”
6/30/03

All the action in Daron Hagen’s outrageous new show—subtitled “A Nightmare Cabaret Opera in One Act”—takes place in the mind of an I.R.A. militant named Taco Bell, who, while undergoing torture, passes out and finds himself on the run in Las Vegas with his pal Dumdum Devine. Their pursuers include a rogue I.N.S. agent named Doll and a down-and-out transvestite lap dancer named Vera (played by the formidable male soprano and female impersonator Shequida, whose most recent stage appearance was as the opera diva “Jessye Normous”). Hagen describes the work as a “postmodern meditation on the death of love,” but, whatever his thematic intent, the eclecticism of the music is dazzling: sharply pointed jazz lines are overlaid with slippery atonal harmony; a plaintive nineteen-seventies folk-rock ballad melds into a Broadway power anthem. Paul Muldoon’s libretto is a marvel of virtuosic wordplay, exuberant, unsettling, and heroic by turns.

Time Out New York
Pick of the Week: VERA OF LAS VEGAS
June 26 - July 3, 2003

Daron Hagen's Vera of Las Vegas is a gutsy, occasionally trashy cabaret opera, which details the fateful intersection of two on-the-lam IRA opertatives and a Las Vegas lap dancer who has a "little secret" of her own. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon supplied the libretto, chock-full of wry references to U2's Bono and The Crying Game. Oh, and did we mention that the title role is performed by the Juilliard-trained drag diva Shequida?

The New York Times
OPERA REVIEW; A Bevy of Eccentrics In a Dreaming Frenzy
July 1, 2003, Tuesday
By Anthony Tommasini

The highly anticipated event was Thursday night's ''Vera of Las Vegas: A Nightmare Cabaret Opera in One Act,'' in its staged premiere. Mr. Muldoon, the librettist, won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. And Mr. Hagen's wide-ranging explorations of musical styles would make him seem a natural for experimental opera. The work was vibrantly staged by Charles Maryan in the downstairs Thalia Theater, decked out as a cabaret with cocktail tables, spotlights and a jazzy orchestra in full view. Yet for all its theatrical flair, and for all the daring flourishes of Mr. Hagen's harmonically tart music and Mr. Muldoon's clever verse, ''Vera of Las Vegas'' is baffling and convoluted.

The story centers on two friends from Northern Ireland living illegally in the Bronx: Taco Bell, who drives a cab, and Dumdum Devine, who tends bar. The opera opens somewhere in Northern Ireland, where Taco is being interrogated and beaten by two leather-clad thugs. He falls unconscious and suddenly we hear the swanky sounds of a nightclub band and six Andrews Sisters-like casino girls.

[Richard Termine for the New York Times (c)]

We meet Doll Common, an Immigration and Naturalization Service undercover agent disguised as a flight attendant on the plane taking the two friends to Las Vegas for a free one-day trip they have won. So the entire casino setting of this cabaret opera is meant to be Taco's nightmare.

But the ''it's all a dream'' setup has long been used by dramatists, opera composers and creators of all kinds as a cover for a lot of self-indulgence and fuzzy thinking. That's the problem here, as we follow Taco and Dumdum in their adventures with the six Miss Catchalls, as the casino girls are called, who variously portray flight attendants, drug dealers and strippers.

Taco and Dumdum eventually resolve their illegal residency problem, and in the process impulsivEley embrace a world where appearance and reality are hard to distinguish, by rushing to a wedding chapel, where Dumdum marries Doll, and Taco marries Vera, an African-American transvestite lap-dancer and celebrated Las Vegas figure.

[New York Times photo by Richard Termine (c)]
In a program note Mr. Hagen likens his score to ''Four Saints in Three Acts,'' the opera by Virgil Thomson with a text by Gertrude Stein, crossed with Bernstein's ''Age of Anxiety'' symphony. In a long, revealing solo scene for Doll, when she speaks of her adopted home as a strangEley mystical place (''The thing I love about Las Vegas is the hoping more, not the having less,'' she sings), you hear echoes of Stein's nonsensically alluring poetry and Thomson's deceptivEley innocent music, with its churchlike harmonies, unruffled pace and intoned melodic lines.

But ''Four Saints'' has a seamless musical flow and guileless textural resonance, whereas you hear the effort as Mr. Hagen blends brassy jazz, crunchy contemporary riffs, wordy recitatives, lyrical outpourings, choralelike choruses for the Catchalls and flashes of cabaret music into his fitful score.

Still, you cannot deny the theatrical audacity of ''Vera of Las Vegas,'' which elicited many cheers from the packed house. The leads were excellent: the lyric tenor Dillon McCartney as Taco, the hearty baritone Elem Eley as Dumdum, the husky-voice soprano Patricia Dell as Doll, and as Vera a theater performer, dancer and Juilliard-trained singer called Shequida, who, despite a loud and strident falsetto high range, was a powerful vocalist and sleek-figured presence.

The six Miss Catchalls were impressive not just for their in-tune harmonizing but for their willingness to shimmy and pout in revealing costumes. This is not the kind of thing singers get trained to do in conservatories. But it's all in a day's work with experimental opera.

BehindTheBeat.net
SOUND PORTRAIT; Vera of Las Vegas

"An entertaining and provocative opera by Composer Daron Hagen and Librettist Paul Muldoon. The clever story mixes sleazy culture and big questions, while the contemporary music has many references to 20th century pop and stage music."

NewMusicBox.org
Soundtracks: Vera of Las Vegas
March, 2003
By Randy Nordschow

Hagen's opera equally captures all the smuttiness, desperation, and humanity of the characters with a quippy flair. The music is truly a canonical hybrid of opera and popular forms, with vocal writing that periodically swings and radiates a sultry, burlesque feel.

Opera News
OPERA REVIEW; Vera of Las Vegas
Online Edition
September 2003
By David Shengold

Six years after orchestral concert performances at the University of Nevada Opera Theatre were recorded, Daron Hagen's one-act Vera of Las Vegas received its premiere staging by Manhattan's Center for Contemporary Opera at Symphony Space, in the composer's own "nightmare cabaret" version, backed by four musicians. The last of a two-day, four-performance run (June 27) attracted an unpretentiously hip, diverse crowd whose desire to be entertained was gratified.

The plot, an espionage nightmare set in Las Vegas, issues from the severely stressed brain of "Taco" Bell, an IRA gunman enduring invasive interrogation in Northern Ireland in 1993: pursued by spies, he and a compatriot, Dumdum, tangle with IRS agent Doll Common, and her friend Vera, an African-American transvestite lap-dancer. Whether this is memory or fantasy is not resolved in Paul Muldoon's fascinating, witty but sometimes arcane, opaque libretto. Muldoon has a marvelous ear for scansion, but through no lapse of Hagen or the strong cast, the complicated verbal play does not always transmit intelligibly into song. One might do well to distribute the libretto to the audience beforehand, in eighteenth-century fashion; despite a surfeit of "user-friendly" pop references to U-2, McSorley's and Powerbooks (in 1993?), those seeking narrative clarity might remain puzzled. After Dumdum rambles on obsessively one too many times about the details of IRA slayings and internecine politics, one identifies with Taco's shout of "Shut the hell up!" (This was not the fault of the seasoned Elem Eley, as Dumdum, though this capable baritone seemed facially and vocally attuned to filling larger spaces.)

Hagen's music wears its eclectic sources -- classical, jazz, pop, rock -- on its sleeve enjoyably enough for its cabaret format. Music director Robert Frankenberry (at the piano and clavinova) fronted an outstanding combo, including Jeff Carney (bass), Paul Garment (reeds) and percussionist Jeff Kraus, who got a real workout. Director Charles Maryan maximized the unorthodox, somewhat cramped playing area through ingenuity in props and variety and timing of movement.

In the title role, Juilliard-trained drag diva Shequida took the stage (and Vera's sustained notes above the stave) with poise and confidence, riveting attention in Vera's autobiographical aria. A churning vibrato made Shequida sound like a higher-pitched Gail Gilmore. With his mellifluous "Irish" tenor, easy stage presence and clear, natural diction, Dillon McCartney (Taco) seemed a find for composers and directors alike.

Patricia Dell radiated music-theater professionalism as Doll -- too much so, as her arch knowingness seemed at odds with the hard-bitten character's emotion-laden ballads. Six well-named Miss Catchalls served multiple functions in the show: stewardesses, lap- and pole-dancers, casino molls and the kind of "lite" Greek chorus Bernstein used in Trouble in Tahiti. Put effectively to work by choreographer Bruce Heath, looking duly sexy and furnishing great attitude, the six (Karie Brown, Nicole Cherniak Hyde, Karen Jolicoeur, Gilda Lyons, Alison Quinn McConekey and Tara Venditti) also brought great dexterity, fine harmonizing and consistent beauty of tone to some of Vera's best music.

ClassicsToday.com
OPERA REVIEW; Vera of Las Vegas
July 27, 2003, Tuesday
By Daniel Felsenfeld

”Vera of Las Vegas” is composer Daron Hagen's second operatic collaboration with Pulitzer-prize winning poet Paul Muldoon. The piece is both an homage to and critique of the eponymous squalid city's "house always wins" zeitgeist. Its billing as a "Nightmare Cabaret Opera in One Act" is something of a misnomer: it is not epic enough to be opera, not incisive or brutal enough to be cabaret, and not freakish and confusing enough to be a nightmare. Instead, it works out as a mostly-successful experiment and an intriguing but peculiar piece of operatic derring-do.

The labyrinthine plot centers around two Irishmen - Taco Bell and Dumdum Devine - who are stuck in Vegas for the night and pursued by a couple of shady characters. Doll Common, working for the INS but posing as a stewardess, offers Taco a free day in Vegas, escort included. The "lady" who shall service him, one Vera Allemagne, is actually (brace yourself for a Crying Game-ish twist) a man. Hilarity and confusion ensue as the opera travels with abandon from casinos to strip clubs to a wedding chapel as Dumdum and Taco undergo several important revelations, with sexuality and loyalty being, for both, more liquid than when they arrived. And, it turns out, the gentlemen have darker pasts than we first imagined. Vegas, in its seedy boulevard-of-broken-dreams way, has taken its toll on all concerned: one night there, and lives will never be the same.

The music gambols from style to style, if not effortlessly, at least without being precious or vague. Hagen always sounds native and confident, using scaled-down orchestration consisting of a piano, bass, drum kit and saxophones, giving the piece its night-club edge. He is a fluent, creative, inventive composer, one whose sparkle and wit shimmer throughout the piece. From the Bernstein-like brashness of the opening bits to Doll's slow pop-ballad aria to Vera's eleventh-hour-save torch song, Hagen (rather self-consciously) goes for broke. And his obvious affinity for Muldoon's wacky, all-over-the-map text, leads to a seamless marriage of words and music, even if the libretto, at times, is too poetically clever for its own good. Where Sondheim-like bitchy irony and urban loneliness could have communicated this story effectively, instead we get a poetic romp that is better on the page than the stage. Word-play on common Vegas terms (like "strip" and "bar") gets lost when sung, and the muddle happens when Muldoon starts to have too much fun with his concepts, thereby forgetting audience, plot, and characters. This is a shame, since the set-up is beguiling. And Hagen has little choice but to follow his librettist, which makes some bits overlong, like the parlando recitatives at the beginning, or Vera's lament towards the end. By the time all has been revealed, the audience has been so long forgotten that it is difficult to care about the characters.

Performances throughout were excellent, though one had to listen past the rough acoustics of the Thalia in order to tell. Thank you Mr. Nimoy for saving this space, but it is hardly one for music: voices and instruments alike sound towel-dampened, so to judge the performers is an almost impossible, or at least unfair, task. As the two roguish Irishmen, baritones Dillon McCartney and Elem Eley were both excellently cast, edgy and brash. Patricia Dell infused soulful subtlety into the role of Doll Common; her aria near the beginning was one of the evening's highpoints. But, in the end, the night belonged to the gorgeous uni-named Shequida as Vera, whose overt sexiness and creamy smooth mezzo timbre, which even cut through the wretched sonics of the hall, caused jaws to drop, for any number of reasons. She tore into her torch song with appropriate bitter-hued sultriness, at once vulnerable and impenetrable, and managed well the libretto's bizarre and rather cheap references (would a drag-queen lapdancer discuss Aschenbach and Abelard, especially while trying to be real?). “Vera of Las Vegas” is essentially musically sound and was well-performed; some tweaking of the libretto would strengthen it even further.

Irish Literary Supplement
Covert Operations: Vera of Las Vegas
Fall, 2002
by Jonathan Allison

Paul Muldoon has written three opera libretti in collaboration with the prodigiously-talented American composer, Daron Hagen. The first of these was Shining Brow (Libretto: Faber, 1993; Vocal Score: E.C. Schirmer, 1995), based on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, first performed in 1993 at the Madison Opera, Wisconsin. Shining Brow will be released by Arsis Audio in 2003. The second opera was Vera of Las Vegas, and the third was Bandanna (Libretto: Faber, 1999; Vocal Score: Carl Fischer, 2001). Very loosely based on Othello, and set in a small town on the US-Mexico border during the ominously named Day of the Dead, in fall 1968, Bandanna was first performed at the University of Texas Opera Theater in 1999.

Vera of Las Vegas was performed by the University of Nevada (Las Vegas) Opera Theater in March 1996, and will be performed again, in the 2003-'04 season, by the Center for Contemporary Opera, at the Nimoy Thalia Theater Space, New York City. Having to write this review, I thought it wouldn't do merely to look at the script printed by Gallery Press, without considering the musical context in which it grew. Admittedly, it is a poetic drama, worth discussing in its own right, but it has evolved out of a specific collaboration between poet and composer, is written with a musical setting in mind, and is best understood in that context. (See Hagen's essay, "Writing Operas with Paul": http://daronhagen.com/perspective-3.html.)

The male protagonists of Vera of Las Vegas are two members of the Provisional IRA, 'Dumdum' Devine and 'Taco' Bell, whose conversation is filled with the kind of double enendres, puns and word play one has come to expect from characters in Muldoon's poems. (P.J. Kavanaugh meant it as a compliment when he described Muldoon as "a serious gamester.") Devine and Bell are en route for Los Angelos, to take part in Wheel of Fortune (not a common Provo destination, one imagines), stopping at Las Vegas on a layover. They have evidently made fools of themselves with the attractive air hostessess on the long flight from LaGuardia, one of whom -- Doll -- decides to introduce them to her Las Vegas stripper friend, the eponymous heroine of the piece, Vera. We have heard of Devine and Bell before, of course. Their illegal activities and disputed whereabouts were a matter of debate in Muldoon's play, Six Honest Serving Men (Gallery Books, 1995.) (That play featured a figure familiar to readers of Muldoon's poem "Anseo": none other than the little Provo "ward of court," Joe Ward). Along with one Dessie Gillespie, Devine and Bell had gone AWOL for two weeks, and, as one of the characters opined: "There'll be no light / shed on those three boys till some farmer turns / back into the field to plow the next score / and slices off one of their heads." In fact, two of them escaped such a fate, though we learn from Vera of Las Vegas that Devine murdered Gillespie, for undisclosed reasons; his memory of the murder provides one of several nightmarish flashback scenes in the opera.

Vera appears to be part of a covert INS sting to arrest the two men as illegal aliens, but it transpires that Trench and Trilby, the stereotypical MI5 men in trench coats, skulking in the background, are not only chasing Provos (they are seen interrogating Taco in a brief prelude to the opera), but are in pursuit of Vera as well, owing to a lawsuit she is refusing to drop, against a judge of her acquaintance: "a little sidebar / I had with a judge. A lot of side. A lot of bar." As one thing leads to another, Taco falls for Vera, who turns out to be a man, and marries her (er...him), in a perfunctory Vegas wedding. Dumdum gets paired off with Doll. The revelation of Vera's gender and Taco's seduction (much to Dumdum's disgust) is explicitly linked to a similar moment in The Crying Game, and Taco is allowed to have an unlikely epiphany, in which he sees the fundamental similarity between men and women: "What's the difference? A bit of loose skin...a fold of flesh...." The revelation of Vera's masculinity and Taco's latent homosexuality dramatizes one of the opera's central themes, that appearances are deceptive, and people, like places, are masked, malleable, and liable to change. As we are told in section XIII by the Chorus: "We shall not sleep, we shall / all be bound on the ever-whirling wheel of / of change, the which all mortal things does sway."

On one level, the opera (sub-titled "A Nightmare Cabaret Opera" on Daron Hagen's website, but the subtitle does not appear in the Gallery Press edition) concerns a journey to the center of modern America ("center" is a word that gets bandied about a lot in Vera, and undermined). It is a place of materialism, greed, mechanical pleasures and phony appearances, an alienating labyrinth in which the Irish travelers become lost and transformed. To this extent, the book hints at allegiance with Hunter S. Thompson's nightmare novel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, another phantasmagoric journey to the heart of darkness. Early on. in reply to Dumdum's remark "the heart of America" Taco responds, "Built of sand," Yet, the opera announces its origins in the nightmare of Northern Ireland's Troubles by repeated references to Ulster place names, horrid flashbacks to obscure scenes of murder. The flashbacks revolve around the brutal killing of Dessie Gillespie, to which Taco confesses towards the close:

"I still hear the wheeps of curlews,
the buzz of bluebottles or clegs
and then a minute's silence, more or less,
before I shot him through his dicky heart."

This antipastoral moment (those curlews and bluebottles have an ironic charge here) typifies how the Tragedy of Northern Ireland underlies the whole opera, bursting to the surface repeatedly. The word "dicky" here highlights the callousness of the murderer'd language; it seems superfluous to say that Gillespie's heart was dicky. There is callousness, too, in the presentation of Gilbey's corpse, observed by Taco -- "Someone had blown / his Adam's apple / clean away" and "Gilbey's head looked like a ham on a hook." The adam's apple recurs throughout the opera -- it is noted that Vera actually has one -- and is linked not only to postlapsarian predicaments but also to the Big Apple, from which the men have fled. Repetition of phrase and image plays a large part in Muldoon's technique here, sewing together the libretto in a pattern of echoes. As for the violence of the imagery, the unsettling vividness of the battered corpses, this underscores the moral vacuousness of paramilitary terror, as the libretto refuses the phony appearances offered by Las Vegas, its slot machines and casinos, bringing to the rarefied atmosphere of the operatic stage an unexpected scale of imagery that one might more readily expect in The Godfather or, indeed, The Crying Game. Muldoon writes opera, as he writes poems, on his own terms.

I was fortunate enough to get hold of a demonstration disc of a performance of Vera, which will be released by CRI in 2003. It is well worth hearing. The part of 'Dumdum' is performed by a steady baritone of considerable range, and Taco by a competent tenor, whose reedy urgency conveys the roller coaster of emotion experienced by this troubled character. However, the tenor has been listening to too many old John McCormack records, leading him to play the character not in a Belfast accent, but in a rather forced West of Ireland brogue; that's OK, he shouldn't sound like Van Morrison singing "TB Sheets," but it jars a little at the start. Doll's part is performed by a very striking soprano, who sings very well in the duet, but I particularly enjoyed the aria "The Thing I Love About Las Vegas" (VI). Vera's countertenor performs the soulful autobiographical aria, "For I, Vera, am the Way" (XIV) with feeling. The female chorus does sterling work singing harmonies, by turns sassy, satiric, and contemplative, as The Attendants (II,IV), the Casino Girls (VIII), the Dancers (X). They perform as the Wedding Chapel Choir in XIII, and their lyrical hymn -- "The ever-whirling wheel of change" -- elaborates memorably a key theme in Vera.

The music is an invigorating melange of traditional operatic styles, complemented by riffs from pop songs, torch song ballads, and Broadway tunes (sometimes accompanied by big brass, or off-key jazz trumpet), and informed by a kind of brash, modernist dissonance, at times reminiscent of the blousy impertinence of the great Weill/Brecht songs of Threepenny Opera. Indeed, the Weill/Brecht relationship comes to mind as readily as the great poetic collaborations of W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten, even though both Auden and Britten have appeared as characters in Muldoon's poetry, and the poet seems likely to have taken an interest in them as writers of opera. The inclusiveness and eclecticism of the music, it should be said, does not make the opera disintegrate into fragments -- it is not a mess of allusions -- since the thing is sustained by a firm musical narrative, under whose control there is scope for radical variations. And the postmodern (if you will) style of mixing suits the Muldoon script, comprehending as it does traditions of high and popular culture, bringing into the great tradition of the aria the seedy, feverish world of political murder, Hollywood movies (The Crying Game, School Daze), the lyricism of Sondheim, and the sweaty passions of U2: "Remember Bono / and the Edge in Las Vegas?" But what about feeling? Is it possible that the willful embrace of hybrid styles, no matter how brilliant or perhaps because so brilliant, can render a story vacant, can ignore or crimp the vein of feeling that otherwise might be tapped? I think the answer is that Hagen's musical score deepens the emotional energy of the characters, bringing out their obsessive feelings of guilt, confusion, alienation, self-hatred, anger, and indeed affection that are implicit there. It is an emotional piece of music, and altogether rather powerful.

Remember the old bibliographic chestnut, "If the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre, where is Hamlet?" Vera of Las Vegas is the Muldoon libretto, published by Gallery, but it is also the recording; it's also the sum of its performances. Admittedly, the libretto is different from the operatic text (understood here as a musical performance), and each of these texts has its peculiar strengths, but for the full effect, witness a performance.

The New Music Connoisseur
A Rave for "Vera"
Vol. 11, No. 2
Leo Kraft

Daron Hagen: Vera of Las Vegas, A Nightmare Cabaret Opera. Libretto by Paul Muldoon. With Shequida, Patricia Dell, others. Presented by Center for Contemporary Opera, Richard Marshall, director. At the Leonard Nimoy Thalia, Symphony Space, NY, NY. June 26th and 27th 2003.

The CCO made a notable contribution to the season by presenting the world premier of Vera of Las Vegas, fully subtitled A Nightmare Cabaret Opera in one act and five scenes. The music is by Daron Hagen, with a libretto by the distinguished poet Paul Muldoon; it ran at Symphony Space on June 26th and 27th 2003. Richard Marshall, the guiding spirit of CCO, was the General and Artistic Director.

The opera begins and ends with a brief silent scene in an interrogation center somewhere in Northern Ireland. Taco Bell (Dillon McCartney), a member of the IRA, is being interrogated by two British officers, the interrogation consisting of slapping his face. The two similar scenes frame the entire opera. The entire action represents the efforts of Taco to escape mentally from his torture by imagining that he and his pal Dumdum (Elem Eley) have been offered a trip to Las Vegas with all expenses paid.

Their hostess, if that is the right word, is Vera, who shows them around and introduces them to various denizens of the town. At the same time they are being hunted by an INS agent disguised as an airline stewardess, Doll Common (Patricia Dell), while two sinister figures in trench coats seem to be pursuing them as well.

If all this sounds rather complicated, it is. But this libretto is a fantasy, and if it is somewhat disjointed, that is not surprising considering that it is being dreamed up by a man who is being tortured. But even if it is difficult to follow the convoluted story line, the libretto does present a number of dramatic situations and confrontations, so that the interest of the audience is held throughout. The script is filled with references to contemporary movies and popular music. When Taco stumbles out of what he had expected to be an assignation with Vera only to find that she is a he, Dumdum asks "didn’t you see The Crying Game at the movies?"

The mood of the story is very much "now", quite up to date. In addition to the references to contemporary events, we have the presence of both the IRA and the INS. And what could be more up-to-date than the title role of a transvestite being sung by a black countertenor.

And what a voice Shequida, as Vera Allemagne, possesses! I have never heard a singer with such an enormous range. His voice is strong in all registers. Shequida can sing quite expressively, too, as in a long aria towards the end of the opera in which she reveals her sad loneliness despite all the glitz and glamour that surrounds her.

All the singing was on a high level, with good tone quality and diction. That applies to the chorus, about which a word will be said later.

Mr. Hagen’s music suits the style of the libretto perfectly. The idiom is very much "Broadway", with references to many kinds of pop music, handled masterfully. The music is tuneful and rhythmically sophisticated, the words set clearly. Much of the music comes in short bursts of a phrase or two which almost interrupt each other in rapid succession, except for two long arias, one for Doll and one for Vera, which are quite successful in projecting a long lyric line. Altogether the opera is a musical tour de force.

Since the theater, Leonard Nimoy Thalia, does not have an orchestra pit, the four members of the band were scattered about the stage, adding to the nightclub atmosphere. The onstage band consists of four players, with a piano and clavinova (Robert Frankenberry), playing the leading role throughout. Paul Garment held forth on flute, clarinet and saxophone, while the percussion was ably handled by Jeff Kraus; Jeff Carney’s bass provided ample support.

One of the most striking aspects of the show was the way in which words, music, and dance were thoroughly integrated. The dancers did not play much of a part in the unfolding of the story line, but the presence of half a dozen scantily clad young females moving about the stage added to the show biz atmosphere that was an important element of the presentation. The stage director, Charles Maryan and the choreographer, Bruce Heath made the most of the limited stage area.

It seems to me that American opera is developing along two separate lines. One stems from the European tradition; Hugo Weissgal’s Esther is an outstanding example. William Bolcom’s View from the Bridge is another, despite its American flavor. The other type grows out of the musical comedy, which in some cases (as in Sweeney Todd) begins to move in the direction of opera, or perhaps we should adopt the current term "musical theater." Stanley Walben’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, also a CCO production, is a brilliant example of the type of opera that derives from American popular sources.

It seems to me that Vera could have a successful run in an off-Broadway theater. It is a very attractive and timely show. But even a short run would cost more than the weekly salary of one of our baseball heroes, and we just don’t do that. In any event sung drama, far from being dead, is alive and showing considerable vitality. CCO is to be congratulated for having brought us such an excellent manifestation of that vitality.


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