On April 20-22, the USC Thornton School of Music’s opera program will present the West Coast premiere of Miss Lonelyhearts, an unusual collaboration among USC Thornton, the Juilliard School and the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. The USC School of Cinematic Arts provided the film clips used in the production.

USC Thornton Opera stage director Ken Cazan directed the world premiere of the opera in New York last year at Juilliard. After directing USC’s performances this month, he will lead the production in Cincinnati next year.

The opera is based on the 1933 Nathanael West novella of the same name about a newspaper advice columnist who suffers a spiritual crisis. West’s stark view of economic and spiritual poverty was a response to the fracturing of the American dream that followed the Depression.
“Opera is all about sex, religion and politics, and Miss Lonelyhearts is about all three, no question,” Cazan said. “I find Miss Lonelyhearts to be very timely, because we live in a country that has a huge evangelical movement, and this story is about a young man dealing with what he was raised to believe.”
Juilliard commissioned the opera for its centennial celebration, and Cazan was recruited to direct the productions before composer Lowell Liebermann had finished the music. The libretto is by J.D. McClatchy.

“We designed the show from the libretto because the music had not been written yet,” Cazan explained. “I had to look at it as a play, which I do with anything, because words always come before music. One of the thrills of my life has been going to Lowell’s house in New Jersey and sitting on the piano bench next to him as he was playing through Act One for me. It was beyond belief. I sat there thinking that I was hearing a bit of musical history, and it was thrilling.”

Bruce-Michael Gelbert, writing on Theaterscene.net after the New York premiere, called the opera “wonderful … a work forging a highly individual and compelling musical path.”

According to Robert Cutietta, dean of USC Thornton, there were several reasons for producing Miss Lonelyhearts as a collaboration. “In addition to being able to utilize the faculty talent of all three schools, we could make it into a much better performance than the schools could do alone because we could spend more money on the production, including the film, the costumes, lighting, etc.,” he said. “By combining our resources, we created something bigger than we could do alone and individually at each school.”

As economic factors are driving more opera commissions to universities, many collaborations have resulted from a desire to join resources and present a truly memorable work.

“Co-productions used to be a huge thing in professional opera companies and that’s not happening quite as much,” Cazan said. “The big opera companies are finding it prohibitively expensive, and right now most world premieres in America are being done in universities.”

In mounting new operas, Cutietta said, “we are not only providing artistic outlet for our faculty but also important professional instruction for our students.”

For Miss Lonelyhearts, Cazan has brought in top-notch professional set, lighting and costume designers, with Emmy and Tony awards on their resumes, to work with students. “Dean Cutietta has always said that we are a professional training program and that we are training young artists to go out into the professional world,” Cazan said, “and I figured if that was the case, then we should bring in professionals from the field to work with them.”

The sense of collaboration extends beyond the involvement of three major universities. Cazan also worked with the USC School of Cinematic Arts to provide the film clips that accompany the performances. “We all shared certain aspects of it,” Cazan said. “Juilliard did the sets and costumes. We produced the film segments with the cinematic arts school and with Soo Hugh, a graduate student director who was terrific. We used four undergrads from the opera department as actors for the film segments, and all of them are doing roles in the opera this semester. It is so exciting.”

For the USC Thornton Opera program, this will be the second challenging piece of the school year, following the fall production of Thomas Ades’ chamber opera Powder Her Face.

Cazan would have it no other way. “We’ll keep trying to stretch it and push the envelope a bit,” he said. “We’ll keep exposing the students to either standard repertoire done in a unique way – which is how all standard repertoire is being done in the world – or new repertoire that they’re going to be exposed to and have to perform. Opera needs to be doing this type of thing.”