DEAD MAN WALKING PRODUCTION REVIEWS
THE NEW YORK TIMES, John Rockwell, (March 12, 2004)
Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking” has been the surprise opera hit of this new millennium. With a taut libretto by Terrence McNally, based on the book by Sister Helen Prejean and the subsequent film, the opera tells the gripping tale of a condemned man, his relationship with a sympathetic nun and his inexorable execution. First performed at the San Francisco Opera in 2000, it has been produced all over the world and released on CD.
THE WASHINGTON POST, Daniel Ginsberg (March 17, 2006)
Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking” is a first-rate opera that received a strong performance from the Baltimore Opera Company at the Lyric Opera House. The opera is a clear-eyed and moving exploration of capital punishment as seen through the eyes of Sister Helen Prejean. With a tightly crafted libretto by Terrence McNally and Heggie’s attractive score, the opera sensitively deals with themes of cruelty, forgivenenss and redemption.
PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE, Andrew Druckenbrod (June 7, 2004)
“Dead Man Walking” makes for a riveting ride... I valued the score’s accessibility (it is also harmonically intriguing), its versatility and its setting of English... “Dead Man Walking” had me glued to the stage like few other operas have.
THE BALTIMORE SUN, Tim Smith (March 13, 2006)
Operas don’t get more relevant or provocative than Heggie’s “Dead Man
Walking.” Based on Sister Helen Prejean’s best-selling bok and with a potent
libretto by Terrence McNally, the piece from 2000 takes the audience deep into
the thorny issues of capital punishment, touching just about every side along
the way. A combination of taut drama (with some welcome humor) and an accessible
score (with some richly melodic music) have made this one of the most popular
works of American music-theater in decades.
“Dead Man” is accessible, unflinching. The best in this opera is very substantial, especially the sextet, which works as effectively as any ensemble scene in grand operas of the past. Above all, the composer’s use of motives is skillful and telling, starting with the twisty, portentous opening one that makes many a subtly altered guise as it helps propel the characters on their individual journeys of self-discovery and redemption.
AD REM, Andreas Herrmann (May 10, 2006)
Heggie has created a thrilling opera … One can’t imagine this opera to be more intense or modern. 100% guarantee for goose bumps.
SAX, Peter Zacher (June 2006)
… [Dead Man Walking] has astonishing power which is intensified by binding gospel, blues and a few pop elements. The SemperOper has often been criticized for being irrelevant. This time there is reason for unlimited praise, as this work and production will leave nobody unmoved.
SACHSISCHE ZEITUNG, Uwe Schneider (May 9, 2006)
Dead Man Walking celebrated an overwhelming European premiere in Dresden. In
the last several years, there has been a trend in the United States: composers
such as Previn, Floyd or Heggie are composing thrilling, successful operas that
speak directly to the public. Heggie’s Dead Man Walking is such an opera. Seldom
has it been so quiet in the SemperOper, and seldom has the public’s subsequent
reaction been as overwhelming as it was Sunday. This work reached the public –
despite all talk to the contrary, contemporary opera is alive.
“Tremendous”: Ovations for a colossal opera performance. How large the danger
for the music and libretto to slip into sentiment. How tasteful and powerful the
work is, which overwhelmingly triumphs over these dangers. The music, a
combination of jazz, late romantic (here and there are echoes of Wagner) and
contemporary music is manifold. Lyrical, with delicious beauty on one side,
dramatic with dissonance but never a bulky force on the other side.
Opulently orchestrated and breathtakingly performed by the Staatskapelle under the tight conducting of Stefan Anton Reck, the sensuous musical language draws the audience along, underlines the libretto and accompanies the characters’ inner development … the vital variety of sounds from jazz, gospel, country and pop music – all of them used sparingly – reach the hearer at once. Dead Man Walking is big opera, American opera at its best. Europe needs more of that.
THE GUARDIAN (London), Martin Kettle
Dead Man Walking makes the most concentrated impact of any piece of American music theater since West Side Story more than 40 years ago. San Francisco, one of the great patron houses of contemporary opera, has a historic achievement on its hands.
Although Heggie's opera is universal in its themes and moral scope, it is also aesthetically and culturally a distinctively American opera. By any conceivable standards, Dead Man Walking is a big opera emotionally. That's part of what one instantly respects about it.
... Heggie is an unabashed melodist. His music is rich and emotionally charged, and carries enormous atmospheric power. The orchestral writing is full of interest and subtlety. Heggie shows astonishing maturity for someone writing his first large-scale dramatic work. There is a sweep to this work which can only be called inspired. ... Heggie's achievement is simply immense.
NEW YORK MAGAZINE, Peter G. Davis
It's said that there are no second acts for new American operas. Well, here's one exception: Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking, which has already chalked up an impressive history since its debut in San Francisco two years ago . . . There are virtually no dead-spots in this fluidly constructed, surefooted, consistently lyrical score. Heggie's strongest suit is his ability to find exactly the right musical contour for a line of text, penetrating to the heart of the emotional situation with expressive vocal writing that never fails to illuminate the characters. Everyone onstage has his or her distinct musical life, the dramatic pacing is impeccable, and the emotional climaxes arrive precisely on time. No wonder opera companies are lining up to stage the piece.
Effective operas do not write themselves, and this one features Terrence McNally's craftily plotted libretto, which deals less with the politics of capital punishment than with personal issues of forgiveness, retribution and redemption . . . McNally understands very clearly how to write a workable text, especially when to step back to allow the music to take over and carry the moment.
Dead Man Walking does have precedents. Floyd's Susannah, Menotti's The Consul, Ward's The Crucible and Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe were all met with initial popular, if not critical, acclaim and went on to establish themselves, and for the same reasons that are likely to keep Heggie's maiden operatic effort in the repertory: compelling characters in a powerful theatrical situation, along with an accessible score by a skillful composer who knows how to press all the right buttons.
USA TODAY, Thomas May
The powerful hold Dead Man Walking exerted on its opening-night audience foreshadows a watershed moment in contemporary American opera.
Heggie's music provides a remarkably cohesive vision. The quiet but worrying thread that begins the score also contains the key to his musical strategy. Its repetitive fretting generates a tension and restlessness that won't relent until the opera's chilling conclusion. Yet, he's able to jump-cut effectively between extremes, from a folk-like kernel of gospel-flavored melody to brutal, acid-splashing chords that make West Side Story sound tame.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, Joshua Kosman
[Dead Man Walking], the maiden effort of composer Jake Heggie and librettist Terrence McNally, must be reckoned something of a masterpiece — a gripping, enormously skillful marriage of words and music to tell a story of love, suffering and spiritual redemption. Add to that a San Francisco Opera production that sets a benchmark for excellence in every respect ... The result was an evening unprecedented here for musical allure and theatrical savvy.
McNally's splendid libretto — by turns plainspoken and eloquent, with wonderful splashes of wry humor to lighten the tone when it most needs it — creates the structural backbone of this wrenching drama. But it is Heggie's expansive, humane and seamlessly ingratiating score that gives the work flesh and substance. In one scene after another, the music lets us feel and understand things deeply that the libretto can only hint at — and what else is opera about?
... the most remarkable aspect of the Dead Man score [is] how unerringly [Heggie] connects individual moments into a single consistent and expressive sound world ... And all of these elements are fused into a score marked by gorgeous flights of lyrical breadth, punchy rhythmic byplay and orchestration that is full of surprises and idiosyncratic choices.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, Joshua Kosman
In its second performance at the San Francisco Opera on Tuesday night, Dead Man Walking proved that it has legs. With cast changes in the two major roles, the Death Row drama by composer Jake Heggie and librettist Terrence McNally proved every bit as gripping and surefooted as it had at Saturday's premiere. Clearly, Dead Man, can support a range of artistic interpretations as fully as any established work in the operatic repertoire.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, David Littlejohn
The most compelling piece of musical theater I encountered this season was Jake Heggie's and Terrence McNally's Dead Man Walking, which sold out most of nine performances in San Francisco -- two more than were originally scheduled. Although this challenging first opera divided the international critical community, there seemed no doubt about its merit among most of the 30,000 people who attended. Audiences sat riveted in silence through the three-hour performance, then erupted into extended ovations after the final scene. Audiences were irresistibly drawn into the complex plight and progress of Sister Helen Prejean.
Since its unprecedented success in San Francisco, eight other companies, including three majors, have expressed interest in staging Dead Man Walking. ... I regard Dead Man Walking as one of the triumphs of the retiring general director (Lotfi Mansouri).
LOS ANGELES TIMES, Mark Swed
Dead Man Walking, Jake Heggie's opera, has legs. A year after its premiere by the San Francisco Opera, it has now received a second production by Opera Pacific, and Tuesday night the company easily sold out the house for the first of five performances at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Opera companies in the U.S. and abroad are lining up to mount either the original or this new production. It will take time, of course, to know just how long this opera's legs will be, but short is not a safe bet. Thus far, it has brought out the best in everyone involved in its performances.
(April 18, 2002)
Dead Man Walking is, to its core, a crowd pleaser created by artists who are also crowd pleasers in all that they do. Add, in Heggie's case, a singers' pleaser, as well. Three hours after the curtain was raised, the crowd roared its approval in a substantial standing ovation.
Heggie, McNally and Mantello each in his own way knows exactly how to get the most out of a theatrical situation, and the performance was superb. McNally's fluid libretto, utterly secure in its dramatic pacing and its ability to control the emotional climate at every microsecond, uses political issues mainly for local color as does, say, Tosca.
Heggie's instinct is to flatter the voice, and he does so unfailingly. He sets words so well that we could have easily done without the projected titles. He also has the kind of feeling for the moment in theater that cannot be learned. One reason this opera held the crowd so well (and I can't remember a time when I've heard fewer coughs in an American opera house) was that this was a compelling story simply told.
New operas may not be as plentiful as they once were, but a time traveler from early 17th century Italy to the War Memorial Opera House, for the premiere of Dead Man Walking, couldn't help but be impressed by the appearance of a thriving art form.
(October 9, 2000)
NEW YORK NEWSDAY, Justin Davidson
In the United States, a successful new opera is a mythic beast: It seems plausible that such a thing might exist, but hardly anyone has ever laid eyes on one. Well, here's a sighting: Dead Man Walking, Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally's lyric thriller of redemption . . . It is the sort of opera that makes people who have experienced it want to do so again and those who haven't wish they had.
ASSOCIATED PRESS, Ronald Blum
Dead Man Walking is the most compelling new American opera in decades, and it's easy to see why companies have rushed to stage it. Heggie's music is lush and the story gripping. There are influences of Gershwin and Britten in the music, which comes together with greater dramatic success than many other new works . . . What makes this work so impressive is that the immediate thought is to wonder how others would handle the roles. What kind of impact would Dolora Zajick have as Sister Helen? Or Lorraine Hunt Lieberson? Or Anne Sofie von Otter?
Heggie is at work on a new opera, based on Graham Greene's The End of the Affair . . . there is much to look forward to.
ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION& THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Pierre Ruhe
[Dead Man Walking] appears to be a certifiable opera hit. Not only does this opera about a nontraditional subject break many of the rules of the genre, but it has done so without sacrificing appeal. This is opera as it was meant to be experienced...
The real triumph here goes to McNally for his taught, flowing text, and especially to Heggie, a largely unknown talent, for crafting a score with no slack musical or dramatic spots, entirely tonal but still dangerous in appeal and eminently singable.
It was composer Jake Heggie's music and playwright Terrence McNally's libretto that accounted for [Dead Man Walking's] uproarious success with the opening-night audience.
OPERA NOW, Ashutosh Khandekar
This is a piece which ought to be embraced by the operatic community at large: it possesses a gritty popular appeal and is full of powerful musical and dramatic momentum. Above all, and this is rare in contemporary opera, the world premiere production packed a devastating emotional punch -- it was an accomplished piece of theater.
It is to the great credit of librettist Terrence McNally and composer Jake Heggie that the opera never becomes a moral treatise on the rights and wrongs of the death penalty; nor does it sentimentalise or sensationalize its subject matter. Instead, Dead Man Walking engages its audience by exploring human motivations and frailties that are at work in a desperate situation -- to love or to hate: that is the stark alternative proposed by the opera. McNally's libretto is full of terse, tough-skinned vigor concealing a tender heart. Heggie's music both inspires and colors the emotional force of the drama with its grainy orchestral writing and arching melodic lines which set the text beautifully for the singing voice. The combined power of words and music is a verismo tour de force that is not a million miles from Puccini.
I can only hope that audiences around the world are given a chance to experience how powerful new opera, written and performed in a thoroughly modern idiom, can be.
OPERA NEWS, Brian Kellow
From the start, the opera has an assured, confident feel, as if Heggie and McNally knew exactly what they wanted to do and did it ... Heggie has composed a rich, unified score that never becomes overly schematic ... his music has a gleaming sincerity and never overplays its hand. The orchestrations throughout are impressively crafted -- Heggie's use of winds and percussion is especially effective -- and his ensemble writing is downright masterly. The finale of Act 1 is a stunning piece of work. McNally is to be credited for his theatrical savvy throughout, and for his ability to keep things moving.
Dead Man Walking may not break any new ground musically, but it may be the first work I've seen that convinced me that opera and naturalism can coexist peacefully. That's no small achievement, and it's one of the many reasons that Dead Man Walking deserves a long life.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE, Stephanie von Buchau
... Heggie may prove to be contemporary opera's savior.
Heggie's rhythmic profile is powerful and his orchestration strong without covering the singers. The opera is particularly accomplished in its many ensemble pieces. If the jail house chorus and the big, concerted finale sounded like the Benjamin Britten of Billy Budd and the War Requiem, those are sound models and Heggie's part writing remains original.
THE WASHINGTON POST, Philip Kennicott
Musically, Heggie's Dead Man Walking is an impressive piece of work, especially given that it's the composer's first opera, that he is only 39, that he has worked mostly in smaller forms and that his subject matter presented almost insurmountable challenges.
... [Dead Man Walking] is indeed a success.
Dead Man Walking holds one's attention over the course of its three hours. Musically, it is tonal but distinctive, strongest in its passages of muted anxiety and tenderness. The composer, best known for his songs, produces elegant musical pastiches (including two pop songs and a gospel tune) and he has passed the first test of a song composer working in opera: He has managed to work on a large scale, with a psychologically compelling mix of motivic economy and invention. He has a very good ear for a wide range of tonal possibilities, with passing stylistic references that suggest familiarity with earlier operas that live in the same claustrophobic world of fear and death.
CONTRA COSTA TIMES (California), Georgia Rowe
Dead Man Walking is a triumph. Heggie gives the story a handsome musical framework, with a sure sense of dramatic pacing, attractive writing for the orchestra, and a beautifully tonal vocal style that makes every voice sound golden. McNally has made a brilliantly concise libretto from Prejean's book.
Heggie's music incorporates bits of jazz, rockabilly and gospel, yet still manages to sound all of a piece. It's the composer's first full-length opera, and he creates a cohesive score with an impressively varied orchestral palette.
This is opera with a powerful emotional heart, telling a story for our times.
THE BALTIMORE SUN, Tim Smith
Dead Man Walking succeeds remarkably as music theater. The score truly sings. [Sister Helen's] journey, and ours, is what this story is all about. The opera effectively relates that story with cinematic fluidity, thanks to McNally's taut synthesis of the book; Michael Yeargan's inventive, often striking set design and Joe Mantello's tightly choreographed direction.
Heggie, writing his first opera at 39, has delivered a score that moves with a decidedly contemporary beat (some of West Side Story's rhythmic and harmonic kick resonates in the rich orchestration). There are telling arias, especially one for de Rocher's mother, whose plea to the pardon board inspires Heggie to eloquent heights. And there are some vivid ensemble scenes. A sextet involving Helen, the parents of the victims and the killer's mother has particular impact.
FINANCIAL TIMES (London), Richard Fairman
The opera that [Heggie] and his librettist, the playwright Terrence McNally, have fashioned from their material appeals directly to the heart ... [Heggie's] bitter-sweet music puts him in the line of American opera composers such as Menotti and Barber, which will not delight hardline critics, but he knows how to tell a story, how to hold the audience's interest and rouse its emotions. There should be a far greater number of new operas filling our theaters and Heggie looks well placed to add to them.
THE BOSTON HERALD, T.J. Medrek
... from the plaintive orchestral murmurings that introduce the opera's harrowing first scene, to the profoundly moving ending, there's no doubt that this is an opera by a composer of great musical heart. And that's more than you can say about a lot of would-be opera composers of greater experience ...
SACRAMENTO BEE, William Glackin
... so many people have done so many things right it's hard to know where to start the praise. McNally's libretto ... is one of his finest achievements in a long career in the theater. The links to the source continue with Heggie's score, which serves the story with utter fidelity at every turn, in many different ways that are among a good composer's powers.
What looked to be a full house stood and cheered in a long ovation. This work will surely be done often elsewhere. If Broadway could still afford opera, it could go to Broadway.