Najmi’s “Mud Girl” stands out in WNO’s evening of new operas
Michelle Mariposa, Tiffany Choe and Kresley Figueroa in Omar Najmi’s Mud Girl at Washington National Opera. Photo by Bronwen Sharp
Mounting new American operas is a solemn duty for Washington National Opera. WNO once more made good on its responsibilities in that department with the latest installment of the American Opera Initiative, a one-evening presentation of three bite-sized world premieres Saturday night in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. Members of the WNO Cafritz Young Artists program sang in a trio of minimally staged, 20-minute operas.
The risk of presenting any new music is that a true success is exceedingly rare, as has been the case throughout music history. Lex Brown’s libretto for the evening’s first work, Tati, followed the plight of three characters inside a bioengineered blue whale sometime in the 22nd century. How they came to be there and what relation they had to each other were explained mostly in the program note, underscoring that the work’s premise was far too complicated for a mini-opera.
Composer Kyle Brenn, a one-time child actor who worked with Jeanine Tesori on Grounded as a copyist, produced a score of limited musical interest. Viviana Goodwin stood out in the cast for her robust soprano voice, heard in the piece’s strongest moment, an aria about the pickled tongue she eats. This delicacy is taken from the whale, whom they call Tati, represented by a large pink contraption at center stage representing her failing heart. Neither soprano Anneliese Klenetsky nor bass Sergio Martínez made as strong an impression.
The middle work, Cry, Wolf, offered even less musically and seemed even more overburdened with political issues at the expense of character development. Clare Fuyuko Bierman set her libretto in an apartment near UCLA. A sweet-hearted young man, Ethan, is visiting his older half-brother, Austin, at college. Austin, insecure about his appearance and his ability to impress women, has fallen under the influence of Zach, who encourages him to fight back against the supposed indifference of women and become a wolf, metaphorically. There was a lot of howling.
Tenor Nicholas Huff, fresh off a strong supporting role in Macbeth this fall, plied ringing high notes and a potent vocal edge to the hateful character of Zach. Jonathan Patton brought a suitably dense baritone sound to his confused, simplistic Austin. Sahel Salam’s Ethan stood out for his clear-eyed sagacity, seeing right through Zach’s muddle-headed view of maleness, making his conversion to the wolf pack at the end of the opera ring false.
Composer JL Marlor has completed collegiate studies with Kate Soper and David T. Little, both accomplished opera composers themselves. Her musical idiom proved rather barren, with most of the energy of the score produced by an overly loud drum kit, drawn from Marlor’s own background in punk music. Few sounds from the other instruments really pierced this clattering shroud of percussion.
The musical and narrative shortcomings of the first two operas became immediately apparent just from the orchestral introduction to the final work, Mud Girl, composed by Omar Najmi on a libretto by Christine Evans. Najmi, who also has a career as an operatic tenor, created a couple minutes of delightful melodic interest for the thirteen musicians of the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra.
Evans created a solid narrative arc with just three memorable characters. Maude, an older homeless woman living under a bridge, has raised a foundling girl she named River. The girl, resisting Maude’s warnings about the danger of plastic in the nearby stream, assembles a creature, the title’s mud girl, out of sticks, mud, plastic bags, and other detritus.
Like something out of a horror movie, it comes to life and becomes River’s friend. Najmi used his score’s alluring melodies and harmonic textures to give this creation life, at first horrifying but then, like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, it becomes sympathetic, even tragic.
Two excellent singers, soprano Tiffany Choe (Poly 1) and mezzo-soprano Michelle Mariposa (Poly 2), gave splendid voice to this creepy being. Costumed in a way reminiscent of the twins in The Shining, their bivocal presence, hovering and strange, proved the evening’s most striking element. Soprano Kresley Figueroa (River) and the extraordinary mezzo-soprano Winona Martin (Maude) both made powerful contributions in roles that were as equally twinned, an ingenious musical mirroring.
Direction of all three operas fell again to Chloe Treat, who made an auspicious company debut with last year’s American Opera Initiative evening. With strategically designed lighting and a few suggestive set pieces, like the hanging object suggesting an arch of the overhanging bridge in Mud Girl, Treat created an effective mini-world for each of the three works.
Conducting all evening with self-effacing confidence was George Manahan, formerly of New York City Opera and last seen at the WNO podium in Terence Blanchard’s Champion.
Washington National Opera’s next production is The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs by Mason Bates, starring Winona Martin among others, May 2 to 10. kennedy-center.org
One Response to “Najmi’s “Mud Girl” stands out in WNO’s evening of new operas”
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Posted Jan 19, 2025 at 7:45 pm by Betsy
Funnily enough the one opera of the evening that chose to operate outside of the tonal world that contemporary opera is known for was lauded here as offering very little. A hilarious misjudgment of a piece that has, pardon my pun, teeth.