Like Malcolm X and Marilyn Monroe, both of whom have been operaticized, Milk is a natural subject for American opera. “Harvey Milk,” with an irresistible one-man-can-make-a-difference theme, takes its hero from confused adolescent to closeted businessman to charismatic gay-rights activist. The Biblical parallels are a bit overdrawn (the Jewish Milk as a latter-day Moses), but it’s powerful theater, alternately hilarious and moving. Unfortunately, Wallace’s score, a grab bag evoking everyone from Puccini to Bernstein to Glass, undercuts it. There are beautiful moments, especially a recurring nocturne, but the overwhelming, occasionally deadening, impression is of manic rhythmic propulsion.
The cast gives the opera a boost, especially Robert Orth as Milk, all edginess and glee; Raymond Very as the remarkably sympathetic assassin, Dan White, and sopranoJuliana Gondek as a remarkably unsympathetic Dianne Feinstein, who was a supervisor with Milk and White. The opera’s real strength is Korie’s libretto, though it has taken some hits for being too generous to Milk, whose famous temper seldom surfaces. He’s not a saint, but he is an emblem. “The scope and span of his life were so immense, we had to leave things out,” says Korie, who wrote 14 drafts, including one in which Milk slew a three-headed dragon (one head represented Anita Bryant). “We wanted to mythologize him.” The program clearly states the opera is “based on factand fiction.”
While the American musical wheezes its way toward extinction, American opera leaps and shouts. Companies are staging new and neglected works. The weekend that “Milk” opened (it moves to the New York City Opera in April and the San Francisco Opera in ‘96; both commissioned itwith HGO), Thea Musgrave’s “Simon Bolivar” premiered at the Virginia Opera. This spring, the Opera Theater of Saint Louis presents a new piece by Stephen Paulus (“The Postman Always Rings Twice”). It’s enough to make any American stand up and sing.
