Next month Opera Parallèle will conclude its 2023–24 season with three performances of the West Coast premiere of Fellow Travelers. Greg Pierce developed the libretto for this opera by turning to the novel by Thomas Mallon with the same title. The music was composed by Gregory Spears. Cincinnati Opera presented the world premiere in 2016. This was followed by performances in New York during the 2018 Prototype Festival. Subsequent performances were presented by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Minnesota Opera, and the Boston Lyric Opera. Finally, the opera is making its way to the West Coast!
Back when the season was first announced, I cited a Wikipedia page to account for the opera’s title. The “capsule description” of “fellow traveler” is “a person who is intellectually sympathetic to the ideology of a political organization, and who co-operates in the organization's politics, without being a formal member of that organization.” In this case the ideology was Communism; and the “fellow travelers” were those sympathetic to the ideology without becoming “card-carrying members” of the Communist Party. Many of those sympathizers were accused of homosexuality, resulting in an anti-Communist movement known as the “Lavender Scare.”
Guest Conductor Jaymes Kirksey (from the Opera Parallèle Web page for Fellow Travelers)
Jaymes Kirksey will be Guest Conductor, leading the seventeen-piece Opera Parallèle Orchestra. Creative Director Brian Staufenbiel will provide the staging. The vocalists will include Jonathan Pierce Rhodes, Joseph Lattanzi, Victoria Lawal, Kurt Winterhalter, Elena Galván, Cara Gabrielson, Daniel Cilli, Matthew Worth, and Matthew Lovell, several of whom will be performing multiple roles. The most significant role to be called out by a familiar name is that of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose part will be sung by Cilli. (Those of us that can look back on “Tail-Gunner Joe” without choking or spitting are getting fewer in number!)
Opera Parallèle will present three performances of Fellow Travelers. These will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, June 21, and Saturday, June 22, and at 3 p.m. on Sunday, June 23. The venue will be the Presidio Theatre at 99 Moraga Avenue, in the southwest corner of the Presidio. All tickets are being sold through a Presidio Theatre Web page. Prices range from $30 to $120. The Web page also includes a hyperlink for information about round trip bus tickets for $35 The opera will be performed in two acts separated by an intermission, with an overall run time of 135 minutes.
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