UNC Opera showcases the American 'Promise of Living'

For UNC music and biology major Cameron Davis, opera is all about expressiveness and exaggeration.

This is the attitude he brought to his character in UNC Opera’s performance of six scenes from American operas over the weekend in Hill Hall’s Moeser Auditorium. 

The show, entitled “The Promise of Living,” was about an hour long and drew scenes ranging from Gian Carlo Menotti’s “The Medium,” in which a girl and a mute boy fall in love, to Mark Adamo’s opera adaptation of “Little Women.”

“I'm hoping that it would be something to help stretch the audience, stretch your ear, but at the same time just be fun and understandable and accessible to learn a little bit more about American life and culture from a different lens, from a different perspective,” Lori Hicks, director of UNC Opera, said. 

In downtime at rehearsal on Thursday, Hicks and the performers would occasionally start belting out some lines of opera music without reservation. Davis practiced before rehearsals in German, one of the five languages he has sung in to fulfill requirements as a vocal performer in the music department.

“Everything is so expressive, like one little thing that one character does, another character will blast out of proportions, and I think that's the art of opera — it just exaggerates life,” Davis said.

Davis portrayed one of those exaggerated characters in the fourth scene, “A Hand of Bridge” by Samuel Barber. He played a deeply unhappy lawyer playing bridge with his wife and another couple while fantasizing about a woman he is having an affair with, whom he wants to “strangle in the dark.” The other three bridge players’ thoughts were stuck on matters ranging from a peacock feather hat to one character’s dying mother.

Scenes like that and Menotti’s “The Old Maid and the Thief” gave disturbing impressions of American life, but the final scene — one from Aaron Copland’s “The Tender Land” — was more optimistic. After Laurie (Eden Rosenbaum) and Martin (Brady Leger) get engaged, the whole cast gave a rousing song about how “The promise of living with hope and thanksgiving / Is born of our loving our friends and our labor.”

The cast learned and rehearsed the production throughout a class this semester, Hicks said. 

“It’s just a fun group of people doing something we like, so there’s a lot of room for enjoyment in that,” junior Ryan Smith said at rehearsal on Nov. 2. 

A few minutes earlier, the cast realized it was Smith’s birthday and broke out into a musically talented rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.”

Smith portrayed the moralizing pastor Parson Alltalk in the opening scene of the performance, drawn from Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha."

The cast was dressed like humble churchgoers of the South a century ago, while the large screen above the stage had an image of what looked like a 21st century megachurch with a multi-colored light show. 

"Treemonisha" was written for an all-Black cast and was never performed during Joplin’s life. Hicks said in an email statement that she chose to perform the opening scene because it could be "applicable and relatable regardless of race." 

This is Hicks’ third semester and third opera at UNC. She was hired from Kentucky State University starting in the 2022-23 school year. Hicks is also the music director at a local church, runs a private voice coaching business and is still a professional singer herself. She is also a mother, which she says is essentially a fifth job. 

While many of UNC Opera’s performances — including the one next semester — are in a variety of languages such as Italian and German, Hicks, who picked the scenes, wanted this one to be comprehensible and accessible to a broader audience at UNC. While she didn’t see any particular theme running through the entire performance, she said she sees a similarity in the efforts of the show’s early American composers, like Barber and Menotti. 

“They were really searching for their own style away from European style, and really Broadway and early musical theater would be considered early American opera, but this is more of that formal opera sound with the way it is sung,” Hicks said.

About 50 people attended the Sunday performance, including Lily Friedman, who came to see her friend Katherine Brown.

“It’s very cool to see really talented people do stuff that you know how much work they put into it, seeing a culmination of something you know people worked so hard on,” Friedman said.

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