Members of the Monmouth Civic Chorus during a 2007 rehearsal.
By TOM CHESEK
“The idea came to me back in 1987, during the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge,” says composer Richard Pearson Thomas on the origins of Golden Gate, the musical that makes its world premiere this Saturday at the Middletown Arts Center.
“According to people who were at the ceremony, at some point the wind in the bay changed direction, and ‘the bridge began to sing.’ That became, for me, the pivotal dramatic moment.”
That a musical called Golden Gate is receiving its first public performance at the site of a former moving and storage warehouse in Middletown, NJ is a bit of a puzzler. Last time we looked, the San Francisco Opera doesn’t appear to have commissioned a cantata about Cooper’s Bridge.
But the landmark Northern California span is, after all, a signpost from an era when massive and sleekly modern public works projects reflected the nation’s bold aspirations and a deep-seated yearning to tame the frontier during some uncertain times. So it makes sense when you consider that the prolific Thomas is an ambitious artist who’s always seeking a new outlet for his original work — and that, under director Mark Shapiro, the Red Bank-based Monmouth Civic Chorus is a “small town” organization with some big notions about homesteading new turf for the human instrument.
Not to worry; the all-volunteer MCC is still the same group of talented friends and neighbors who brighten the holiday season with Handel’s Messiah each year. But they’re also the people who in 2007 presented the world premiere of Jorge Martin’s Stronger Than Darkness, a serious work adapted from the words of Cuban dissident writer Reinaldo Arenas. And they’ve shown a genuine knack at crafting gorgeous musical settings for the sublime syllables of Shakespeare, Whitman and other poetic champs.
The intersection of words and music is a specialty shared by Thomas as well. The Montana-born, Manhattan-based faculty member at Columbia University’s Teachers College has created acclaimed song cycles based on the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay and the whimsical rhymes of Edward Lear. For his 9/11 memorial piece Race for the Sky, the lyrics came from “things that were left on the street by people, collected at the New York Historical Society.”
With a book by writer-director Joe Calarco, Golden Gate tells the story of a Depression-era family who suffers the loss of their daughter, an Amelia Earhart-inspired aviatrix who had planned to fly over the suspension bridge during its ribbon-cutting ceremony. On their way to California to collect the remains, they encounter a group of migrant workers, a waitress and other characters with their own reasons for being there, and their own perspectives on the American dream.
Under the stage direction of Eric Einhorn, the musical will be presented concert-style — without costumes or sets — and with two pianists (including the composer himself) accompanying a 17-person cast that’s toplined by chorus members Patti D’Andrea, Joan Curcio, Ken Wasser and Matthew Izzo.
Thomas had accompanied the MCC a few years ago on a Stravinsky program, and when Shapiro expressed interest in performing Golden Gate as a choral concert, the composer set to work compensating for the lack of a big onstage bridge by making the musical arrangements bigger themselves.
According to Thomas, “the challenge was to take what was really an intimate, family sort of story, and to add voices to it.”
During the Middletown event, a narrator (performed by Dan Ford) has been added expressly for this occasion. Tthe music runs a gamut, from hymnlike solos and pastiches of 1930s popular styles to a contemporary musical-theater idiom that the composer describes as “a little more complicated than your typical Broadway score.”
It all happens Saturday at the Middletown Arts Center, located on Church Street (off Kings Highway) directly adjacent to the NJ Transit rail platform. The new community cultural facility is really just minutes from the Red Bank or Little Silver train station; there’s free on-premises parking for those who roll by car. Performances are scheduled for 3p and 8p; tickets for each are priced at $25 general admission and can be reserved right here.
