We start with joyful ragtime, that musical theater fallback for telling Black tales of the early twentieth century.
However the sound is muffled, distorted. The social gathering is elsewhere within the boardinghouse the place our heroine, Esther, a shy, plain lady of 35, sits in her room stitching corsets and camisoles for socialites and streetwalkers. She is simply too severe and too bold to descend to the parlor and cakewalk with the revelers.
So is “Intimate Attire.” In musicalizing Lynn Nottage’s play of the identical title, Ricky Ian Gordon, working with a textual content by Nottage herself, needs extra for Esther than a fast dance and a slick tune. A lady so bent on betterment in an age that makes it nearly not possible deserves probably the most severe and bold musical remedy obtainable — and will get it within the knockout Lincoln Heart Theater manufacturing, directed by Bartlett Sher, that opened on the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater on Monday.
That the play was glorious to start with was no assure of a viable libretto. However trying again on its 2004 Roundabout Theater Firm premiere, starring Viola Davis as Esther, you’ll be able to see that “Intimate Attire” already had the mandatory components for a robust opera: backbone, scope and poetry.
The backbone stays neatly articulated. The primary scene shortly establishes that Esther (Kearstin Piper Brown) has the self-discipline and drive to make a profession of her handiwork; with the financial savings she sews into the liner of her loopy quilt she plans in the future to open a magnificence salon. The scene additionally establishes her delight, as she rejects the last-chance males who come to the events given by her landlady, Mrs. Dickson.
“Pleasure’ll depart you lonely,” Mrs. Dickson (Adrienne Danrich) warns.
We subsequent meet two of her purchasers, whose lives categorical in contrasting methods the constraints Esther hopes to flee. Mrs. Van Buren (Naomi Louisa O’Connell) has each luxurious a white lady of privilege might need, together with the pink silk crepe de chine corset that Esther brings to her boudoir for a becoming. However Mrs. Van Buren, skilled solely to be a rich man’s spouse, has no choices when her husband loses curiosity.
Although poor and Black, Mayme (Krysty Swann) is likewise at males’s mercy for her few luxuries — which, amusingly, embrace the identical corset as Mrs. Van Buren’s. (“What she acquired, you need,/What you bought, she need,” Esther feedback.) As an alternative of an absent husband Mayme has johns who are sometimes vile or violent, but she is nearer to Mrs. Van Buren than both would possibly prefer to assume.
Esther’s friendship with the ladies is greater than skilled however nonetheless circumscribed by class and race. (She has by no means entered Mrs. Van Buren’s home by means of the entrance door, and presumably by no means entered a brothel in any respect.) Her third skilled friendship is much more delicate. Mr. Marks (Arnold Livingston Geis) sells material on Orchard Road, saving probably the most lovely bolts for her. Although he’s the one man ever to acknowledge and encourage her present, he’s actually untouchable: an Orthodox Jew.
However he isn’t the one man to flirt along with her. Esther is shocked — after which, nearly in opposition to her will, gratified — to obtain a letter from a Barbadian laborer engaged on the Panama Canal. Plainly George Armstrong (Justin Austin) is on the lookout for a pen pal to counter, with lovely phrases, the filth and harshness of his job. As Esther can neither learn nor write, she relies on Mrs. Dickson to inform her what George is saying; after which on Mrs. Van Buren and Mayme to forge suitably Cyrano-like replies.
I’ll say no extra in regards to the plot besides that on the finish of Act I Armstrong arrives in New York to marry Esther, who wears an beautiful costume made with material she purchased from Mr. Marks. If she will not be what may need been anticipated from their correspondence, neither, she regularly realizes, is he. In Act II we study why.
Many performs sewn so tightly unravel utterly as they stretch towards their disaster. Not “Intimate Attire”; with its eye on the large image, it maintains each its integrity and its stress to the tip. By no means stinting on element — or, apparently, interval analysis — Nottage forces the viewers to maintain sight of the bigger pressures pushing all her characters into conditions they have to finally escape extra explosively.
I concentrate on the story as a result of it’s often the issue with opera, as books are with musicals. Nottage has minimize maybe half of her play to make room for Gordon’s music, and in doing so has made the sensible if painful option to retain solely what’s most narrowly tailor-made to the plot and but most allusive. What we name poetry in opera will not be actually the verse (although Nottage’s libretto is flippantly rhymed the place crucial) however the wealthy texture of all the things doing double obligation.
So too with Gordon’s lush but intricate rating, which soars into the timeless ambiance of operatic writing (although he calls his hybrid works “operacals”) whereas all the time regrounding us within the specifics of interval and character. In numbers like “No One Does It for Us,” repeated choruses do greater than ram residence beautiful melodies; they underline the similarities between Esther and Mayme, who sing it. And it’s not for nothing that George’s letter arias from Panama are usually accompanied by a ghostly refrain of different males, as if to query their unusual intimacy.
None of those sensible selections would matter if the performers couldn’t make hay of them, however Sher has assembled and tuned an unusually nice forged of opera singers who can really act. Brown is very heartbreaking as Esther — and astonishingly tireless in an enormous function. (Chabrelle Williams takes over for the Wednesday and Sunday matinees.) Her scenes with Geis as Mr. Marks are so light and wealthy in subtext you don’t need them to finish. However all six leads are terrific, and the ensemble of eight different singers performs dozens of roles, every shortly and completely etched.
Sher’s staging within the 299-seat Newhouse, on a easy turntable set by Michael Yeargan, is a marvel of fixed motion that by no means feels busy, and the costumes by Catherine Zuber are beautiful even when plain. As all the time, it’s a pleasure to listen to an opera in an intimate house with acoustics so clear and pure — the sound is by Marc Salzberg — that the captions projected on the partitions of the set are not often wanted. And although the voices are prioritized in Gordon’s orchestration for 2 pianos, the presence of the devices, on platforms above the stage, will not be incidental. As performed on Friday night by Nathaniel LaNasa and Brent Funderburk, they appeared to have dramatic roles of their very own, representing not solely the necessity of ladies, particularly Black girls, for emotional independence, but additionally the world of 1905 that forbids it.
In that sense “Intimate Attire” — much more as an opera than as a play — is an act of rescue. When Esther tells Mrs. Van Buren, as they write the primary letter to George, “My life ain’t actually worthy of phrases,” she implies that she isn’t particular sufficient to be made everlasting on paper. That isn’t true; as Nottage and now Gordon have proven, she is worthy of much more. She is worthy of music that’s lastly worthy of her.
Intimate Attire
By means of March 6 on the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Operating time: 2 hours half-hour.
Supply: NY Times
