6/21/2023 0 Comments Gold rush cast 2016![]() ![]() The one jarring sight was the quartet of dancers dressed like American flags in red, white and blue. The costumes were a good mix of authenticity with enough modernity to make them look very pleasing to the eye. Rita Ryack, the costume designer, got much of her inspiration from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s photography collection. There are no side curtains and the stage hands are visible throughout the performance, moving things on and off, giving an impression of the rustic unfinished nature of the times. The set design, by David Gropman, combines period authenticity and anachronism and includes some beautifully crafted backdrops and stylized representations of redwood trees, a wagon made from Gold Rush design, and a gigantic 24 foot tree stump. The two men have worked together extensively and seem to have a very mutual admiration. Sir Peter Sellars mixed and matched these many texts to form the libretto. Other sources include an Argentinian poet who traveled to California, Mark Twain’s ‘Roughing It’, and, most movingly, Frederick Douglass’s speech “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?” from 1852. Adams wrote his own music to words from diaries, journals, and mining songs, chief among them “The Shirley Letters” of Louise Clappe, a doctor’s wife who spent some time in California during the gold rush and wrote home to her family her observations. This work, not to be confused with the early 20th century Puccini opera of almost the same name (“The Girl of the Golden West”), depicts the highs and the lows of the gold rush. ![]() He is, of course, also very well aware of the degradation and destruction of so many parts of the area as a result of the mining and has seen the ghost towns that remain after the gold was mostly mined out. The subject and the action of the opera have been percolating in his mind for many years as he hiked and marveled at the beauty and majesty of the foothills of the Sierra. John Adams is a resident of the Bay Area (Berkeley) and has owned a cabin in the Sierra Nevada, very near where the action of this opera occurs. ![]() Other operas by John Adams, all produced by San Francisco Opera, include “Nixon in China”, “The Death of Klinghoffer” and “Doctor Atomic”. It was created for San Francisco Opera in a co-commission and co-production with the Dallas Opera and the Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam. The latest operatic iteration of this theme, The Girls of the Golden West, is the new collaboration of John Adams and Sir Peter Sellars, those two well-known and well-respected musical geniuses, Adams for his music and Sellars for his librettos and direction. The California gold rush of 1849, like so many events of the near and past times (think school renaming, removal of monuments, altering textbooks, discrediting political leaders) has been undergoing a revision in the minds of historians, with an eye to opening our eyes to the darkness below the light, or, in this case, the tarnish beneath the shine. ![]()
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