*Suddenly, Last Summer,* Oct 25 2026
Mike and I saw *Suddenly, Last Summer* at Opera Philadelphia on Oct 25, 2026. It's an opera with music by Courtney Bryan and a libretto by Gideon Lester and Daniel Fish based on the play by Tennessee Williams. I've seen the movie (with Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Montgomery Clift) probably five or six times and thought its overheated drama might work well for an opera. On the other hand, with something so heightened in its original state, does it need to be heightened even more? It ran the danger of those two things working against each other and flattening each other out to became something dull and/or wearying. That's what happened with Andre Previn's *A Streetcar Named Desire* so I was a bit skeptical. But the show had a serious whiff of FOMO about it so I decided to take a chance.
I'm so glad I did because it was one of the most original new operas I've ever seen. It was a success because of the way it combined the different elements of the show. I'll discuss each of them separately.
THE MUSIC
There was an article in Opera News years ago about new operas and what makes it an opera rather than a musical or a play in which everything is sung. The answer was the music - - the music, according to them, has to be the primary element. The opera has to work on a recording, without everything else that goes with it. I think they need to revise their terms because today's new operas are more integrated, they're conceived to be a complete theatrical experience not wholly dependent on the music. That was definitely the case here. Bryan's music was effective and involving, well-written for the voice with a strong sense of instrumentation, but I wouldn't say it was particularly distinctive or imaginative. It served its purpose very well because it was seamlessly integrated with the other aspects of the production.
THE STRUCTURE
The three main characters of the play are Mrs. Venable, a rich lady in New Orleans, her niece Catherine, who's been put in an asylum, and Dr. Cukrowicz, the man who Mrs. Venable is talking into giving a lobotomy to Catherine, to silence her. Catherine had been on vacation with Mrs. Venable's son Sebastian the previous summer, when Sebastian died under murky circumstances - - the play ends with Catherine telling the grisly (gristly?) story of his death. The creative team made the genius decision to have Catherine be the only character who sang. Mrs. Venable and the doctor were played by actors who only spoke. This gave a welcome variety to the show and also set Catherine up to have more impact than the other two, in a sense to legitimize her singing by making her something apart from the others.
The show also featured a boy choir. The boys sat onstage in the climactic final scene, sitting still but having an ominous presence. The one misfire was the way they handled Catherine's mother and brother: they were played by actors whose performances were filmed and projected onto the back wall. Mike and I thought this didn't really work, it felt canned and flat. I think they could easily do away with those roles altogether.
The Williams estate required that there be nothing added to the libretto, every word had to come from the Williams play. They could cut things and move them around, but they couldn't add anything new.
THE PAINTING
The set was a black floor, many black chairs, and a white wall on the left and the back of the stage, pitched at a severe angle. The actors generally inhabited the left two thirds of the stage - - on the right there was a table with a painter standing at it, Lucy Tarquinio. She painted in wet, abstract lines and shapes throughout the show and her paintings were projected onto the wall behind her, totally filling the stage from the floor to the flies. The content of her painting was carefully timed. Mrs. Venable has a monologue at the start of the show, telling the story of a trip that she and Sebastian had taken to the Galapagos Islands. They watched the female sea turtles lay their eggs in the sand and return to the sea, then the newborn turtles come out of the sand and scramble to the water. But there were birds overhead and they flipped the baby sea turtles over and tore at their flesh and ate them. The painting was in shades of green and grey when Mrs. Venable was starting the story and we had trails of bright red when the baby turtles were killed. The painting always amplified the drama and the music, it never felt like a distraction.
THE LIGHTING
The one element of the show that will stick with me the longest was the lighting in the final scene, when Catherine has her nervous breakdown monologue. She was sitting in a chair in the middle of the stage. The boys in the boy choir sat on chairs, motionless, around the stage, facing all different directions. One of the older boys (he was maybe sixteen) moved to the side of the stage and was operating a spotlight. It was trained on Catherine and its light had a sort of ice cream cone shape, with the point on the floor near the spotlight and the rounded top centered around Catherine. He slowly moved back and forth from one side of the stage to the other, with the spotlight on Catherine the whole time. The light also projected the shadows of the boys onto the back wall, making them even more sinister. I can't explain how effective this was, it made her monologue so much more hypnotic and involving.
THE PERFORMANCES
Stephanie Roth Haberle and Branden Lindsay were very strong as Mrs. Venable and Dr. Cukrowicz, they had great presence and were fully committed to the production. Soprano Mikaela Bennett was of course the star of the show, her singing was multi-faceted and charged with emotion. She gave me the impression of a talented young artist eager to show what she can do. What could be more exciting than that?
I had a feeling that Bryan wrote her vocal lines with the knowledge that her text would be projected above the stage in supertitles. This freed her from setting the text so that every word had to be understood. In that sense the supertitles were another crucial element of the show.
The final line was given to Dr. Cukrowicz: "I think we ought at least to consider the possibility that the girl’s story could be true…"
Here's a making-of video that was made for the premiere at Bard a few months before:
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