Baritone Aaron Engebreth and soprano Aliana de la Guardia in Guerilla Opera’s world premiere of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. Sham Sthankiya photograph
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage
Cambridge
Guerilla Opera
2/3/23
The intrepid chamber ensemble Guerilla Opera, in its sixteenth season, staged the world premiere of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, a joint production with MIT Music and Theater Arts, Feb. 3 in MIT’s Building W97.
Elena Ruehr composed the score, with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, based on the popular graphic novel by Sydney Padua.
Guerilla Opera’s artistic director Aliana de la Guardia sang the role of Ada Lovelace, and baritone Aaron Engebreth portrayed the hapless inventor Charles Babbage. Soprano Erin Matthews and tenor Omar Najimi filled out the vocal cast, both singing multiple characters.
A quartet of instrumentalists tucked themselves into a corner of the stage: violinist Lilit Hartunian, percussionist Mike Williams, clarinetist Rane Moore, and cellist Stephen Marotta. A trio of dancers—Anelise Avila Tatum, Henoch Spinola, and Wesley Urbanczyk—enlivened the action, and helped with scene transitions. Giselle Ty directed.
The premiere marked the opening of MIT’s Building W97 black box, a promising venue with superior technology. The large, tall room with interactive walls and screens conveyed supertitles, shifted backdrops, and easily captured the madcap design and mutating narrative of Padua’s densely constructed novel.
IRL, Lovelace and Babbage intersected in nineteenth century England. Babbage spent his life trying and failing to complete his Difference Engine, a calculating machine that prefigures modern computers.
Lovelace, the daughter of the poet Byron, was Babbage’s partner in experimentation. Her vast annotations to Babbage’s description of the Difference Engine have made her commonly accepted as the original software programmer.
Padua’s novel starts with the couple’s incomplete technologies and runs away. In her extravagant extrapolations, Babbage’s Difference Engine gets completed, and Lovelace’s ideas take the inventors through adventures and dimensions.
The opera does the same. Lovelace and Babbage meet the Queen, fight crime, visit the third dimension, and genially ponder a human future meshing with computer intelligence. Along the way jokes get played, cat memes get invented, and cartoonish jump-cuts lead Babbage and Lovelace though chaos, crime and many day-glo costume changes.
Musical highlights abounded: de la Guardia, who sang richly and expressively, pleading “Give me poetical science” over tasty quartet accompaniment. A percussion solo (Mike Williams played engagingly all evening) behind a quartet of voices—“The Amazing Geek”—that turned into an onstage boogie. Erin Williams singing the Queen’s cat aria—the imagined birth of a British Hello Kitty.
The dancers moved fluidly from funk to en pointe, creating a continuous arc of creative motion. Movement was choreographed seamlessly into the opera—not just for the trio of dancers. Ruehr’s score sounded organically danceable, simple on the surface and layered richly in the interaction between singers, dancers and instrumentalists.
The impressive video capabilities of the room were used to show supertitles, change scenes and in general capture the antic energy of Padua’s novel, where each page has cartoon blocks, multiple asides and gigantic footnotes. Moveable picture frames onstage, used by all the characters, mimicked the comic-book graphics. Padua contributed original drawings to the set.
Ruehr’s score was wonderfully singable, not always a given in a narrative driven opera. She even incorporates the chunky sound of a real Difference Engine (subsequent computer scientists have completed Babbage’s project), a recorded sample triggered during one of the interludes.
Najimi and Erin Williams moved hilariously through various complementary roles, wearing an impressive variety of fluorescents. Ty directed the 75 tightly packed minutes—a blur of shifting sets, rolling picture frames and costuming—without a hitch.
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage gets repeat stagings later in 2023, with productions at the Pine Mountain Music Festival (Michigan, in June) and at Michigan Technological University (October).—Keith Powers