Is the Future of American Opera Unfolding in Detroit?

[Lowell]

So reads the headline of this New York Times Article in today's edition with a nice Gray Lady Detroitgasm featuring the Detroit Opera artistic director Yuval Sharon. *Detroit Opera was formerly known as the Michigan Opera Theater but was recently renamed Detroit Opera at Sharon's insistence. Nice move IMO.

Cited in particular is an edgy performance held inside the crumbling Michigan Theater / garage.

A restaging of a marathon piece by the Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, “Bliss” requires its performers to replay the final three minutes of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” without pause for 12 hours.

Sharon’s production took place in what was once the Michigan Building Theater, a former Detroit movie palace that closed in 1976; infamously, when architects determined that demolishing the theater would make an adjoining office building structurally unsound, the interior was gutted and transformed into a multilevel garage.

The writer [Mark Binelli, native Detroiter, and author of excellent Detroit City The Place to Be] was clearly enthralled with the setting and the 12 hours of re-performing of the last three minutes of The Marriage of Figaro which he describes as a "purgatorial repetition ... a perfect metaphor for our daily lives during the pandemic."



The article makes clear the huge stature Sharon has in the world of opera, and mildly ponders over why he took a post in Detroit, and supplies this answer.

Mark Williams, the chief executive of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, told me that when he heard about Sharon’s move to Detroit, he was not surprised....Sharon’s ambitions, Williams said, were bigger than guest directing; he was “the sort of person who would want to come into a space where he could really effect change, rather than going into a more established space and becoming more of a caretaker.

As a deep partisan of the city, I say with all fondness: The future of American opera unfolding in Detroit was not a plot twist I saw coming. And yet, Sharon countered, Detroit might actually be “the perfect place to really push for what the future of opera can be.” He is not interested in a universalist, one-size-fits-all approach, where “La Bohème” ends up the same in Detroit as it does everywhere else: “No, it’s got to be totally of Detroit in the end. That, to me, is the path forward.” Couldn’t — shouldn’t, Sharon insisted — opera in Detroit look and feel and sound like nothing else in the country?

I like that attitude. Thoughts?