Adoration, a 90-minute chamber opera produced by trailblazing new music theatre originator, Beth Morrison Projects, opens tonight at Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, 18 Bleecker St., New York. Adapted by librettist Royce Vavrek, original music by Mary Kouyoumdjian, the long-awaited world premiere — a preparatory rendering workshopped at Banff Centre last summer — essentially mirrors Toronto-based writer/director Atom Egoyan’s taut, award-winning 2008 psychological thriller, according to Vavrek.
A high school teacher, Sabine (Miriam Khalil, soprano), reads a newspaper account of a thwarted bomb attack on an Israeli jetliner to members of her class, encouraging one of them, by way of a writing exercise, to employ the incident as the basis for dramatic, expressly personal story-telling. Simon (Omar Najmi, tenor; Sammy Ivany as young Simon), a particularly imaginative student, irreparably scarred by the horrific car crash that killed his father Sami (Karim Sulayman, tenor) and mother Rachel (Naomi Louisa O’Connell, mezzo-soprano), appropriates details of the real-life attempted terrorist strike, casting his parents as potential mass murderer and unwitting accomplice respectively. The wildly fictional account quickly spreads on the internet, exploding into a perilous viral sensation. Simon’s only remaining family, his uncle, Tom (David Adam Moore, baritone) and grandfather Morris (Marc Kudisch, baritone) reveal dark secrets. All, including Sabine, become players in a twisted saga.
Scored for six singers, prerecorded chorus, string quartet and electronics, Adoration, the opera, part minimalist drama, part overarching testament to our times, unearths any number of ugly features punctuating contemporary reality. Bigotry, hatred, brutality, all clearly play their part here. “I’m hoping it causes people to reach inwards,” Khalil messaged earlier last week. “And think about prejudice rather than lashing out.”
An engaging feature of this year’s NYC Borough-wide PROTOTYPE Festival, Adoration shows every indication of developing into much more than a bold, experimental musical experience. A proposed live audio recording hints at plans to continue to build audience far beyond the iconic fringe of Greenwich Village.
Laine Rettmer directs. Alan Pierson conducts.
Six performances: January 12-13 & 18-20 at 8:00 PM. January 14 at 5:00 PM.
Tickets here.