“This is a very special piece, one I’m connecting to deeply,” she told me over the phone.
#SFOPERA GIRLS OF THE GOLDEN WEST PROFESSIONAL#
J’Nai Bridges, a mezzo-soprano from Washington who pivoted from a professional basketball career to opera, plays Josefa Segovia, a young Mexican woman who entertains at the Empire Hotel - and who also happens to be the first known woman lynched in California. J’Nai Bridges as Josefa Segovia in ‘Girls of the Golden West.’ Photo by Kristen Loken I spoke with two of the people who embody those tales in the production, J’Nai Bridges and Davóne Tines, about their unique characters, what it took to prepare to play them (Zumba! Who knew?), and the lessons this new opera about the Gold Rush can teach us today. “Telling tales of racial conflicts, colorful and humorous exploits, political strife and struggles to build anew a life and to decide what it would mean to be American.” “The true stories of the forty-niners are overwhelming in their heroism, passion and cruelty,” Sellars says. (Sellars’ libretto draws from The Shirley Letters, a collection of 23 letters by Louise Clappe penned under the name Dame Shirley - as well as the diary of Chilean miner Ramón Gil Navarro, Mark Twain’s Roughing It, memoirs of fugitive slaves, Chinese immigrants’ poems, and the Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni, among other texts.)īut there are several other characters, whose often-overlooked stories take center stage to Adams’ naturalistic, driving music, among designer David Gropman’s innovatively rustic sets. The main thread is that of Dame Shirley, an educated woman who chronicles the rugged and tragic goings-on of a mining camp in 1851-52. With Julia Bullock, Davóne Tines, J’Nai Bridges, Ryan McKinny, Paul Appleby, Hye Jung Lee, Elliot Madore, and Lorena Feijoo.Īnd while Girls of the Golden West may not completely change our idea of the period, it certainly adds necessary complexity, foregrounding stories of women and people of color inspired by actual historical record. The San Francisco Opera in rehearsal for “Girls of the Golden West,” a world premiere opera with music by John Adams and libretto and direction by Peter Sellars. This is home to me,” he says in the opera’s production notes. I have hiked through those valleys and along those hillsides. “I have a cabin in the Sierra Nevada Mountains not far from where these events in the opera took place. So I said to John, ‘Let’s have the great American opera about California.’”įor his part, Adams - whose 1987 Nixon in China was an absolute triumph when staged at SF Opera in 2012 - was drawn to the idea by his actual proximity to the subject matter. Peter Sellars (librettist, director) and John Adams (composer) of ‘Girls of the Golden West.’ Photo by Jacklyn MedugaĪ couple years ago, Sellars was contacted by La Scala in Milan to direct a production of Puccini’s belovedly creaky 1910 La Fanciulla del West, aka The Girl of the Golden West, which did much to cement the stereotypes of the time in the international popular imagination.Īs Sellars told the Washington Post, “Now anybody who knows me would not call and ask me to do that, but I did the research … and that libretto is pure popcorn. It was partly this frustration with the hokeyness of previous representations that drove director and librettist Peter Sellars to team up with minimalist composer John Adams and create Girls of the Golden West, a new work premiering at the San Francisco Opera (Tue/21-December 10 at the War Memorial Opera House, more info here.)
#SFOPERA GIRLS OF THE GOLDEN WEST SERIES#
While current HBO series Westworld adds dark, sci-fi undercurrents to the Wild West trope and recent HBO series Deadwood gave the frontier people of the 1800s some realistic curse-words and filthy predicaments, the California Gold Rush remains more of a sanitized theme park ride than the hugely consequential, environmentally degrading, murderous and politically momentous clash of cultures and value systems it was. ALL EARS After two decades of well-worn Gold Rush metaphors about Silicon Valley, we’re long overdue for a fresh take on a time period calcified in most peoples’ minds as some boisterous, Disney-esque romp, rife with (mostly white) 49er bromances, shady stereotypes, and lusty Madames with hearts of, well, gold.
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