Charleston has some serious opera street cred. It’s true: When you consider the George Gershwin standard, “Summertime,” was plucked from a Charleston-set opera and the first colonial operatic production was staged here some 286 years ago. Charleston has a major place in American opera history.
“No matter how much we try to make opera something elevated, it’s in our popular culture,” said Leah Edwards, general director for Holy City Arts and Lyric Opera (HALO), a nonprofit arts organization that came into its own during 2020 lockdown with mobile performances across the city, giving people a chance to experience opera outside of a formal hall.
“You’ve directly consumed opera, but you just didn’t register it because it’s a part of something else,” she said, like when she realized while watching Avengers Age of Ultron that Hulk was listening to a renown Maria Callas aria to keep himself calm.
Edwards and her husband Dimitri Pittas, HALO’s co-founder and artistic director, have decades of experience between them, Pittas as a leading opera tenor in major opera houses around the world, and Edwards as a pianist, vocalist, and actress on and off Broadway with contribution to the Opera America Songbook.
HALO is all about bringing seasonal opera and musical theater installations down from the performance hall into the city’s common spaces, Edwards said, which is a pretty retro concept considering opera was first staged in America in a Broad Street tavern room back in 1735.
The first opera produced in America, Colley Cibber’s English ballad opera, Flora, not only premiered in a non-operatic setting, but it was also making fun of traditional European opera with over the top drama and comedic elements.
This derivative format of ballad opera interweaved popular songs of the time with dialogue to create a story, Edwards said, borrowing from what Englisman John Gay pioneered years earlier with his stage play The Beggar’s Opera, which was not necessarily geared toward a well-to-do audience.
“Opera does not have to be grand, but that’s what it’s become — it did not start out that way,” said author and historian Harlan Greene, current scholar in residence at College of Charleston.
Late 19th and 20th century opera was taken from its roots and appropriated and used as a status symbol, Greene said. While at one point opera was seen as entertainment for the people, it lost this original relatability by being put in formal performance halls.
HALO seeks to challenge that barrier and just kicked off its inaugural season with three runs of Traviata at the Joseph P. Riley Jr. ballpark and will close in April 2022, with four stagings of Into the Woods at Battery Gadsden Cultural Center on Sullivan’s Island. To keep opera culture anchored in our everyday life, HALO will also offer curated opera history walking tours next spring.
“If you want black tie or ripped jeans and a black T-shirt — show up. We came together with a piano on a pickup truck singing opera barefoot in our driveway,” Edwards said of HALO’s beginnings in April 2020. “It was weird enough already, so we all just went with it. What HALO has grown into is an organic, grassroots arts organization.”
It’s this concept of relatability that the origins of Charleston-inspired, world-renowned opera, Porgy and Bess, encapsulated when it was staged on Broadway in 1935 by Gershwin.
“People didn’t embrace that African Americans were singing in jazz vernacular in an opera, let alone that it wasn’t staged at a metropolitan opera house, but a popular venue,” Greene said of Porgy’s initial U.S. reception. Yet it became an entree for American culture in post-World War II Europe and was the first piece of Western theater to be staged in the Soviet Union.
The opera came to be from Charlestonian DuBose Heyward’s 1925 novel (turned into a play by his wife Dorothy) about a disabled Black man, Porgy, and the apple of his eye, Bess.
The Broadway production was atypical, considering it was a white male novelist with slave-owning ancestors who wrote the empathetic portrayal of a Black man who was not some vaudeville caricature, but a man with dignity and independence, Greene said, who authored Porgy and Bess: A Charleston Story.
Decades later, the stage adaptation of the groundbreaking novel wouldn’t just showcase the informal trait of American staged opera, it also found itself at the center of the city’s evolution on race.
When Porgy was to be staged in 1954 at County Hall, a repurposed mill at 1000 King St., the all-Black theater company, Stagecrafters, tried to negotiate with the both the NAACP to segregate the room and with the state to lay aside its integration ban, according to journalist Herb Frazier’s historical summary in, We Are Charleston. Both rejected the compromise. The NAACP wanted a fully integrated audience, and the state wanted it fully segregated.
It wasn’t until 1970 when the opera would play in Charleston, in the newly desegregated Municipal Auditorium, near today’s Gaillard Center.
“It truly was — where opera beforehand had been in the province of the elite — that opera served as a social vehicle to bring Black and white together in the city of Charleston,” Greene said. “Opera itself ends up having a healing role to play in the social fabric of the city of Charleston.”
Porgy and Bess’ form and execution challenged dividing lines since the get-go, and local classical musicians in the Charleston scene reflect that spirit as they espouse classic opera today.
We’ve been conditioned to see the opera form as inaccessible due to the language barrier, yet pianist Chee-Hang See, a CofC graduate, goes by feel in his capacity as an orchestra musician and vocal coach.
He prepares for a project by listening to a recording of the opera for tone, he said, embracing the idea that the listener has intuition to interact with the piece and distinguish the mood of a song no matter the language or knowledge of the plot.
Chee-Hang has watched viewers of all experience levels personally relate to the material performed at HALO’s Social Distance-Sing concerts.
“It’s not just a part of history, we can actually still feel it,” he said.
Local classical violinist and Music Academy teacher Nina Sandberg said she usually encourages opera newcomers to start with Mozart, as his compositions can be more accessible and uplifting than other classics. Think The Magic Flute or The Marriage of Figaro.
In Sandberg’s perspective, HALO’s approach helps people experience opera in smaller doses, laying ground for classical music to become
a normal, shared experience, like hearing a band play
at a restaurant.
“Opera seems to be too loud, too long, too complicated, too upper class. I don’t think it needs to be.”
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