Brilliant tech: COT’s ‘The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing’ and Lyric Opera’s ‘Proximity’
Jonathan Michie. Photo by Michael Brosilow.
Incubated by Chicago Opera Theater, The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing in its world premiere really hums when it eschews sepia-toned prestige-picture pomp and embraces colorful messiness. Radical gay messiness, perhaps, but we’ll get to that.
Not that sepia and pomp are unexpected in an opera set in Keep Calm and Carry On/post-austerity Britain—going in, audiences probably have in mind The Imitation Game, the 2014 prestige pic about Alan Turing’s work cracking Nazi Germany’s wartime encryptions, which was perhaps the most exposure the world has had to Turing to date. (Other than, you know, personal computers, which owe much to his theories.)
But when presented in these seven scenes over two acts (only one of which expressly concerns his ingenious decryption process), composer Justine F. Chen and librettist David Simpatico merely offer tasteful portraits of period gay misery—long-dead soulmate, would-be lavender marriage, glowering bureaucrats, priggish judges, physical torture, death under murky circumstances. Musically attractive, certainly, and never unintelligent, but overall not particularly rousing. A problem, then, for a piece that’s trying to get its audience’s dander up over the exact sort of anti-LGBT+ politics that so befell Turing. Near the end, its near-hectoring denial that Turing’s death was a suicide—surely, it must have been foul play!—is particularly tiresome.
But it’s the very end that makes it worth it. Turing neither dies in shame by suicide nor is assassinated by government officials wanting to snuff out his marvelous brain. Chen and Simpatico reclaim Turing’s death, if you will. They offer a third option: a nobly pursued but failed attempt at “transmigration”, that is, uploading human intelligence into the judgement-free eternity of a computer.
It was especially worth it to hear Jonathan Michie really let loose. Not that his turn as Turing wasn’t already borderline-heroic—lanky in frame, powerful yet vulnerable in voice, crushed at nearly every turn—but, when surrounded by rainbow bursts and the voices of his past swirling in his mind, Turing freely and gleefully commends himself to his experiment.
Perhaps in reflection of its cloistered subject, The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing is tightly controlled by design. But with that finale as a guide, the creators can start mussing its hair and coloring outside the lines.
The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing closed on March 25th.
The Company. Photo by Todd Rosenberg.
Impresario Yuval Sharon has staged operas in a train station, a parking garage, and even within a fleet of moving cars. It was only fair to imagine what he could marshal up with Lyric Opera’s resources at his disposal.
2023 is still young, but Proximity, a trio of one-act operas, might just be the most technically dazzling production you’ll see anywhere this year.
It’s staged on a gigunda curved LED screen that almost calls to mind Robert Lepage’s infamous Machine. The screen doesn’t move or cant in any way, but the crystal-clear projections and the company work in perfect tandem.
Staged in “shuffle mode”, as Sharon calls it, the three operas cross-cut between each other, all meditating on the theme of human connection, ranging from the gritty (The Walkers, music by Daniel Bernard Roumain, libretto by Anna Deavere Smith) to the wistful (Four Portraits, music by Caroline Shaw, libretto by Shaw and Jocelyn Clarke), to the cosmic (Night, music by John Luther Adams, libretto by John Haines).
The Walkers, based on interviews Smith conducted with members of Chicago CRED (Create Real Economic Diversity), a non-violence non-profit, has the most substantive plot of the three, and Roumain mingles the skittering rhythms of verbatim speech well-enough with the one-three downbeats of orchestrally inclined hip-hop. Likewise, lifelong environmentalist Adams would zoom all the way out to contemplate this maltreated little blue dot we call home. But, at least for me, Shaw and Clarke’s emerged as the most casually radical—framed around a break-up between a man and a woman, it finds music in dropped phone connections and GPS systems, and, without revealing too much, it seamlessly incorporates lip-syncing.
All three pieces work together in unison, though, and it ends exactly as it should: on a clarion call for the future. Because, sometimes, hope for the future is all we can have.
Here’s hoping Lyric returns to the well of the new again, and that they have an explorer like Sharon at the helm again to go adventurously off-course.
Proximity runs through April 5th at the Civic Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Drive. For tickets or more information, please call (312) 827-5600 or click here.
For more reviews on these or other shows, please visit theatreinchicago.com.