A scene from Elena Ruehr’s Cosmic Cowboy. Kathy Wittman/Ball Square Films photograph
Cosmic Cowboy
Boston
White Snake Projects
9/16/22
Cerise Lim Jacobs gets so many things right.
The self-styled “Opera Maker” adds composer Elena Ruehr’s Cosmic Cowboy to her list of outstanding White Snake Projects premieres, joining extraordinary scores commissioned from Zhou Long, Scott Wheeler, Dan Visconti and others.
The operas themselves, liberally incorporating innovative effects, feel like a glimpse of a future where opera, film and video-game styles co-exist more intuitively. Her troupe is a model of inclusion, setting standards the industry must respect.
She simply needs to hire a librettist.
Cosmic Cowboy opened Sept. 16 at the Emerson Paramount Center in Boston. Soprano Carami Hilaire starred as Tiamat/Tia, supported with a cast of authoritative voices, including countertenor Daniel Moody (Qingu/Cooper the robot), and bass-baritones Tyler Putnam (Marduk) and John Paul Huckle (Apsu).
Juventus New Music Ensemble—percussion, horns, strings, keyboards—performed enthusiastically in the pit. Tian Hui Ng conducted, and Sam Helfrich directed. Jacobs conceived Cosmic Cowboy, and wrote the libretto.
The opera visits the same story twice. First, just after the Big Bang, the goddess Tiamat wrestles for power with her husband Apsu and her brother Marduk. Millennia later, Tia faces a similar struggle, as Marduk and Apsu attempt to colonize Mars.
Men are evil. They want power, they kill, they destroy the environment. Women are good. It’s embarrassingly straightforward. Throughout Cosmic Cowboy, stick-figure characters continually confront each other spouting platitudes in cardboard scenarios.
Above all these bumper-sticker ideologies, the music remains transcendent. Ruehr deftly explores the sonic variations of horn, percussion and voice, creating a rich fabric of a score, not a stitch out of place and not a color unintended. Every note had meaning.
Juventus New Music Ensemble—ten instrumentalists, prominent among them the horns—sounded as powerful as a Mahler orchestra at times. Synth-harpsichord (Julia Scott Carey) was scored in surprising and inviting ways.
Tian Hui Ng conducted confidently—no small feat in a premiere featuring so many moving parts. Helfrich blocked the action smartly, with characters moving organically place to place, and singers given the best chance to showcase. Several dancer/robot pas-de-deux (Olivia Mozie, Jackson Bradford) were sublimely scored and choreographed (Gianni Di Marco).
The voices were well cast. Hilaire, in the protagonist role, often overpowered the room and the moment, but throughout her singing was dramatic and forceful—even as she was obliged to make platitudes sound like wisdom. Two duet arias with Moody sweetly explored the soprano/countertenor possibilities.
Moody, in dual roles (Qingu/Cooper the robot), is a stalwart countertenor; his instrument breathes character and color. He also proved a poised actor, being placed repeatedly in awkward physical situations (unrealistic fighting, love-making, stereotypical robotic moves).
The male villains (sorry to be repetitive) sang with maleficent force. Huckle (Tiamat’s pathetic husband Apsu) garnered unintended guffaws with his animosities (“I hate these kids, they’re everywhere”). Putnam, as the arch-villain Marduk, also sang with power-lifting vigor—singers sounding out over chorus or instruments was never an issue here.
The Boston Children’s Chorus spent too much time onstage uninvolved in the acting or singing, often a distraction. The ensemble sang beautifully nonetheless—especially a quartet, “Drops of Blood.”
Visual/lighting effects (more than a dozen technical artists credited) were effective in enhancing the two basic sets. But when the visual effects tried to enhance the narrative—explosions, or space travel, or avatars advancing the plot—the results were cartoonish. Especially lip-synching. An attempt to guide the audience through VR goggles failed completely.
This music, and these impressive artists, deserve a more idiomatic narrative. Apart from some unintended humor, characters and situations are tritely portrayed. The IRL social issues that White Snake Projects so ably addresses in its inclusive casting and thematic concerns, are poorly explored with this unimaginative libretto.
Jacobs hires accomplished composers, and lets them work. Nobody can doubt that future operas will incorporate some of WSP’s technical innovations. Her casting and artistic concepts cannot be overpraised. White Snake Projects has a history of outstanding opera premieres that are advancing the field, in artistry, onstage techniques and offstage social issues.
Each one of WSP’s memorable premieres has had the same problem: Jacobs needs to hire a librettist.—Keith Powers