[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Kate Hinds: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kate Hinds, in for Alison Stewart. Thanks for joining us and happy Friday. Coming up on today's show, we'll hear from famed street photographer James Hamilton. He captured iconic pictures for The Village Voice and the New York Observer, and there's a new documentary about his life called Uncropped. We'll hear from him about it as well as director D.W. Young.

Later in the show, we'll hear highlights from our April Get Lit with All Of It event with author Stephen Graham Jones. His slasher novel is called My Heart is a Chainsaw. All Of It producers Jordan Lauf and Simon Close hosted and they were also joined by this month's special musical guest, rapper Frank Waln, so we'll get to hear some of his performance as well. That's the plan so let's get this hour started with a trip to the Opera.

[MUSIC-El Niño]

Kate Hinds: That is from the Opera El Niño, which is playing now through May 17th at the Metropolitan Opera. It was written in the year 2000 to celebrate the new millennium. Composer John Adams, along with librettist Peter Sellars, adapted the story of the Nativity, the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, and the Birth and Infancy of Jesus. Now the production is getting a dazzlingly, colorful and rich treatment at one of the biggest institutions in classical music courtesy of Director Lileana Blain-Cruz. Not only is it her Met Opera debut, but it's also the first time that a Metropolitan Opera production has been solo directed by a Black woman.

The production features lush and vibrant sets, two different performers portraying Mary, gigantic puppets, mesmerizing choreography, and an angel Gabriel who's played by three countertenors wearing pointy silver crowns and singing in unison. Most importantly, it centers the story of Mary and Joseph's migration from challenge to challenge and their flight from the danger of King Herod who seeks to kill the baby Jesus fearing that he will one day usurp him. Joining me now to talk about this, is Director Lileana Blain-Cruz. Welcome back to WNYC. I know you've been here before.

Lileana Blain-Cruz: Thank you.

Kate Hinds: Also with us is singer Davóne Tines who portrays Mary's husband Joseph as well as King Herod. Davóne, welcome back to WNYC.

Davóne Tines: Hello.

Kate Hinds: Lileana, let's start with you. What made you want to direct this opera and make it your debut at the Metropolitan?

Lileana Blain-Cruz: Sure. It's a dream come true. I'm still in this surreal place of like, "I'm at the Metropolitan Opera House, I'm directing at the Met." When I met with Peter Galb a couple of years ago, we were just coming out of the pandemic, and I felt like we were all questioning as artists like, "What's the work that we need to make right now? What are the things that we need to wrestle with? What does it mean to be alive after this enormous world event?" El Niño, having been written for the Millennium, felt like the best kind of piece that asked that question is like, what is the future of humanity? How are we going to be together? How are we going to move forward into the future?

Kate Hinds: What did you find compelling about the original version that you wanted to take with you or put your own spin on?

Lileana Blain-Cruz: For one, the music is insane. The music is amazing. It's massive and huge and it sends shivers through your whole entire body. That was my first excitement about it. Then I think embedded into the pieces like this core love for Mary as the center of the story. Then not only a single Mary, but fracturing or adding a multi-layered dimension to this idea of woman as every woman as life and giver of life itself was really thrilling to me.

Then part of the libretto like they've taken-- it's a collage of different sources. Poets like Rosario Castellanos and Gabriela Mistral were two artists who I really admired and getting to experience the story as told as a multi-layered experience felt true for the complicatedness that I felt like we were all existing in the current moment.

Kate Hinds: You mentioned something really interesting that I wanted to point out, a fractured Mary, a Mary who is portrayed by at least two women, there were times in the opera, I wondered if there was a third. Meanwhile, Davóne is called upon to be one man embodying at least two people, both Joseph and Herod. What was that like having to, I mean, not really toggle between because Herod has just one scene, but it's a 180.

Davóne Tines: I think about this show in the way that I love to think about the shows that I enjoy the most, which is they are jungle gyms or carnival rides. I think jungle gym is the best way to put it because building a performance with a director and a team, it's like you're setting up the obstacle course, and you're deciding the contours, and different conditions that you will essentially put yourself through.

This is a particularly complex and intensely colorful course. Instead of just saying, this character is moving forward or to the side and space, this character is changing shape and scale, and color, and size, and simultaneously layering that on top of other parts of different characters. For example, I enter as Joseph, and I have a very strong reaction to my wife being immaculately pregnant by not me.

Kate Hinds: Spoiler. You weren't thrilled.

Davóne Tines: I wasn't so thrilled about it, it's quite hard to understand, but the angel Gabriel appears as three countertenors and then tells me that maybe this is going to be okay. I then, as Joseph, channel the voice of God, so there's a simultaneous obstacle course or fun challenge of staying in the emotional truth of somebody who is full of confusion, but also wonder at what is being spoken to and through him, while also trying to hold the immensity and truth and honor of a scale of an idea of God coming through a very human context. I'm always pulled between extreme scale in this piece, and it's really thrilling. There's nothing to leave unturned in yourself.

Kate Hinds: You have to go from playing the man who wants to protect Jesus, to the man who wants to kill Jesus.

Davóne Tines: Completely.

Kate Hinds: The scene where you come out as Herod is amazing. I don't know how to describe it. It's like a plinth, you're a statue, you're being brought in on almost like a diyas, and I didn't know that it was you. It wasn't until you took your hat off that I was like, "Oh, it's the same person,"so much did you embody Herod. It was great. What did that feel like in the moment?

Davóne Tines: Thank you. It feels like an amazing opportunity to show the complexity that can exist within one individual. I think a genius of the piece itself, what Peter made and how John augmented it musically, and then what Lileana and her team amplify, is this idea of multiplicity of a personage. In the realm of having the female voice and the Latinx voice speak dominantly in the piece, there's a multiplicity, there's a refraction of the female identity that I think allows it a really sumptuous nuance, a lot of entry points for the audience to say, "Oh, this is one way of the woman or feminine journey." That's another angle of it. "Oh, let me also experience this color of it and just praises the idea of femininity because it's allowed to be shown in facets."

Whereas man is made to be contained within one body as the counterbalance, but also saying, "Oh, all male energy is going to just be a singular thing that we are going to allow it to be flat for the purpose of allowing the femininity to imbue much more space." In performing that, especially in performing Herod, I think it's a really amazing way to say that all of us contain the possibility for great good and great evil. It's important for us to hold that truth within ourselves simultaneously and be consciously engaged in our choices.

Kate Hinds: Similar to thinking about that as a duality, the scene when you find out that Mary is pregnant, you say, "Who has done this?" That is your first question. Then when Mary sees the aftermath of Herod's massacre of the innocents, she asks, "Who has done this?" It's that same question informs the core of the story.

Davóne Tines: Completely, and technically is the same person, so how are you doing good, or how are you doing bad.

Kate Hinds: Lileana, there are a lot of things that make this production stand out. We spoke about how colorful it is, how unusual it is. I think it might really appeal to people who think of opera as like La Traviata, or Carmen, or something that would be considered a more traditional opera. I feel like you're seeing things on stage you don't normally see. How did you approach that?

Lileana Blain-Cruz: I think in many ways I like to make work that everybody can feel invited to, that it feels like alive, and exciting, and thrilling. I think part of that was accomplished by the amazing work of this design team. Adam Rigg designed an incredible playground that was vibrant and alive. Hannah Wasileski paints projections with light, literally, you feel like you're in a surreal universe, depending on your perspective.

I had a friend who was like, "It felt like I was in a video game, and you have another friend who was like "The puppets were alive because there are puppets inside the show." That's what excites me. Then Marjani Forte-Saunders did this amazing movement vocabulary that moves throughout the show. In some ways, I think it's an invitation for all of your senses to feel ignited, and that's been the joy of working at this scale as well.

Kate Hinds: Can we talk about the puppets for a minute?

Lileana Blain-Cruz: Sure.

Kate Hinds: Because I was reminded that there was a big mammoth puppet in the skin of our teeth.

Lileana Blain-Cruz: That's right.

Kate Hinds: It made me think, "Oh, you like puppets?" What can a puppet do that a human can't?

Lileana Blain-Cruz: Like when I was working with James, James Ortiz is the puppet designer and director, I was like, "How do we represent the divine? What does divinity look like? How do you get the massiveness of nature itself?" I think what puppets can do is, in some ways, they're the most incredible active participation of the imagination of the audience, while also creating abstract ideas into real form. In Shake the Heavens, the piece that Davóne was talking about where he is Joseph, internalizing the voice of God, it was like, "How does God show up?" James was like, "What if it's a variation of the angel Gabriel", like the rage angel is what we ended up calling it?

Puppets, in some ways, can expand and extract idea and yet make us feel the humanity inside of that simultaneously, which I think they also did, spoiler alert, with the dinosaurs, [laughs] with the dragons, at the very end, which I think it gets the audience involved in another way because we have to suspend our disbelief to make it real, and yet, we are so aware of the artifice simultaneously. There's a real theatricality to that that I think is what makes it feel unique and alive.

Kate Hinds: You've directed an opera before, correct?

Lileana Blain-Cruz: That's right.

Kate Hinds: Obviously, you've had a lot of experience in opera, how did it feel working with Lileana versus some other directors you've worked with? Did it feel very different? Or how did you two talk about this opera?

Davóne Tines: Yes. I've had a pretty unfamiliar track in building a life of work in the opera world, in general. I was blessed early on to work with some really incredible people, first, Maestro Lorin Maazel, the late maestro, who was really wonderful, and in his old age really took young singers under his wing. I got access to a practitioner who really just wanted to share their love of the craft, as opposed to feeling that I was just bowing down to someone great, there was someone who was wanting to invite.

Then one of the first directors I worked with was Peter Sellars who I think is one of the preeminent artists in performing arts that have really championed the idea of bringing the individual human experience to the piece itself, meaning, the piece is not a story that you put on yourself, the piece is a conduit for the person to be their fuller self and make them alive. I had become accustomed to a really beautiful and open way of working that Lileana has only just continued and blossomed and expanded.

I couldn't have asked for a more beautiful environment to enter somewhere like the Metropolitan Opera, but be welcomed with the boisterous beautiful energy that is always willing to support and open and find that is not to be taken for granted in any way. The performing arts is a very complicated context, and the world is a complicated context, where people forget to ask how are you, and to actually listen to the answer of that. I always felt that openness and availability from Lileana, and that's why we have the beautiful production we do.

Kate Hinds: Oh my gosh, I'm going to come by. Just to talk about this amazing team, Davóne is incredible, Julia is incredible, Janae is incredible. All of the countertenors, like this whole company of people, Marin. You know what I mean?

Davóne Tines: Yes.

Kate Hinds: There was such an energy of like, "Yes." "Oh, you want to do that crazy thing?" "Yes." Janae being like, "I would like to fly too." "Yes." Everybody was like, "Let's go." I think Davóne did an amazing job of leading the company and being, "All right, let's go for it. This can be anything we want it to be." Going in with that sense of courageousness and fun and wildness is I think part of the success of the show. There's just so much love.

Speaking of Peter Sellars, these are artists. Peter Sellars and John Adams lead with love. It's baked into the work in some ways, like a radical questioning of humanity and also being like, "We can be good too. We are capable of such destruction, but we can do beautiful, amazing things." I feel like when opera does well and theater does well, everybody in the audience is like, "Yes, we're amazing. Living is amazing." That's what I think we all reach for in some ways.

Davóne Tines: Completely.

Kate Hinds: I sit here, my desk is outside, it's very near John Schaefer who is the host of New Sounds. He talked about El Niño earlier this week, and I said to him, "What did you think of El Niño? What is El Niño mean to you? He was just like, "Oh, it's brilliant." I said, "Say more about that." He talked a lot about it, but he said, "At its core, it reminds you that the intent of the story is about marginalized people trying to figure it out." That really struck a chord with me.

Lileana Blain-Cruz: Yes. At the end of the day, they built it with this idea of migration. We're in a moment right now where there are so many people migrating searching for safety, searching for the future of their lives, and the ability to honor and love all of those people for having the bravery to take that journey, I feel very grateful to honor in this production.

Kate Hinds: I want to just play another clip now because I want to hear your beautiful voice again, Davóne. You sing in the bass-baritone range, and we have a highlight from a 2019 performance of this music. Let's listen.

[MUSIC - Davóne Tines: Shake the Heavens]

Kate Hinds: For those of us who don't know what bass-baritone means, can you give us a little opera 101?

Davóne Tines: Oh, opera 101? How many years do we have?

[laughter]

Davóne Tines: No, the conversation about voice types, that's a really interesting thing because it has to do with categorization and how do you turn organic multitudes into clear categories. Those categories, we also call them Fach in the German tradition, continued to evolve and they mean different things in different centuries even. My voice, I guess, could be described as a somewhat a unique voice type in that I am like a bass-baritone, which is somewhere between a baritone which is kind of understood as the "normal male voice", and then very low bass, but I'm in the middle here.

I also have a very high extension. I can go pretty high to like an F above tenor high C, and there was a voice type categorization made in Italy a long time ago when they had a broader sense of this called Basso cantante. That means a male voice that is foundationally low but is able to have a higher extension because of its low foundation. There's that, but also, it's really lovely to hear that recording again.

That's me with my incredible colleagues at the American Modern Opera Company performing at the Met Cloisters, in a version of El Niño that was championed by incredible soprano Julia Bullock. She worked with John Adams and Peter to craft a more intimate version of this piece called Nativity Reconsidered. That's, I guess, kind of a entree to how much we love this piece. Julia has worked so hard to figure out ways for it to be performed again and again in multiple contexts.

Kate Hinds: If you're just joining us, you're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kate Hinds, in for Alison Stewart. We are talking about the Metropolitan Opera production of El Niño, which is directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz, and sung in part by Davóne Tines, they both join me in studio now. If we can just do another definition, one of the things that caught my eye when I was reading the program for this is El Niño is an opera, but it's also an oratorio. What does that mean? How do you interpret that?

Lileana Blain-Cruz: Yes. One, an oratorio generally is performed in concert settings. There's a telling, there's a narrative structure that's a part of it, but again, being radicals that they were, they made an opera oratorio, which means that it has the grand opera sound while also creating these narrative structures. Joseph is not only speaking in the scene as Joseph, he's also narrating Joseph. Joseph heard what she said and then slapped his face, and Davóne has to do this crazy thing of both narrating his experience while living the experience simultaneously.

Then normally in an oratorio, the chorus gets to hold their books and sing all the music while reading the book, because it's crazy music. I have to give some credit to this chorus because they have memorized music that normally you get to hold and read. They are moving throughout the stage and they're giving life, and it is thrilling.

Davóne Tines: Incredible.

Lileana Blain-Cruz: It's incredible. Just the act of getting to move this opera oratorio in full moving production is a big feat on itself, which I give kudos to all the singers for, being able to do because it is massive.

Kate Hinds: And also, they're moving. There is choreography and there are dancers whose job it is to dance, but everybody has movement. Some of the motions really struck me, like there's an arm motion where people are using their arms almost as hammers, and then this motion, which is your two hands sort of cradling something that could symbolize pregnancy or an egg. How did you approach that?

Lileana Blain-Cruz: That I want to give some love to Marjani Forté-Saunders. We call the one that's like cupping, it's creating this little cup, we call that blessed cup. One of the things that we were interested in is, so much of this is about iconography. Like the iconography of Mary, the iconography of symbols, the iconography of how we understand what it means to hold the entirety of the future. We, with Marjani, found ways in which the chorus, which is kind of a representative of the earth. The chorus lives as landscape in the production, how they can hold the energy of Mary as we move through her journey. What does it look like when the angel arrives? How does the land respond to the massiveness of what she's holding inside of her?

Marjani's dancers, this incredible company of movers, one of the gestures that you described is they're holding their elbow and they're cupping their hand towards themselves, and they do this rocking motion. What's so beautiful about the piece is that pregnancy is not like, "Woo-hoo-hoo. I'm pregnant, I had a baby, and I'm fine." It's like, "This is complex. This is massive. The weight of this, the connection and the disconnection." I think Marjani's movement allows us to see the complicatedness of that, how it can be both a supportive gesture and also a heavy one, and also a mechanical one.

Then also, it transforms into an open one as the palm faces the Mary, in this case Janae, who's just gotten off the boat and there's support inside of that. That's what's so thrilling, I think about working in opera is that you can have all those things simultaneously. You have like 17 different levels coexisting. I think that's what makes it vibrate.

Kate Hinds: At one point I was trying to count, there are like 50 people on stage. There might even be more than 50 people on stage.

Davóne Tines: 5,000.

[laughter]

Kate Hinds: When I walked into the opera on Saturday night, the first thing that struck me was that the curtain was up. It looked like the stagehands were still putting stuff together. What was that choice?

Lileana Blain-Cruz: Yes. That's such a glorious choice of working in a grand opera that is doing transition. Basically, it was an unintentional intentional choice where they were moving the show that happened literally that afternoon into the transition into the evening, and just going to say it was an accident [laughs] in that case, but in some ways, I thought it was kind of amazing. If I had been maybe even a little more experimental, it would have been a choice, but in some ways, we got to see the mechanics of how things happen, how things get moved because they needed to project and get that happening, but normally, it's a beautiful, beautiful piece. [laughs]

Davóne Tines: I think it's an absolutely brilliant choice, now that it happens, because I really enjoy the behind the scenes. We, as creative artists, we live in the process of things. Our life is not just what you see in the show, but everything that goes into it. Having worked even behind the scenes as a stage manager and production manager in my life, I''ve always-- and even I'm doing a concert with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus on Monday, where we always talk about, "How did we get here?"

The fact that the audience gets to enter this space and say, "Oh, all of these flats, all of these different mechanisms coming together," one, I think is demonstrative of Lileana's brilliant team's conception of how to do an opera in a presentational way, very intentionally to say, "We are here to show you a story," but to also have people see the naked elements of the production itself and then allow that to be transformed magically when we all decide to tell a story together. I think it's a big statement.

Kate Hinds: We just have a couple of minutes left, but you mentioned your concert on Monday, and I wondered if you could talk about that for just a minute.

Davóne Tines: Yes. I've been working with Brooklyn Youth Chorus for over a year now as a mentor to some of the students. I've also been BAM's artist-in-residence, the first one there in about 35 years. It's meant a deep dive into getting to know both organizations a lot. From my own background in sociology and arts administration, I really want to understand how are the parts and institutions forming and replicating themselves in healthful, equitable, and also ways that are conducive to a healthy blooming arts world.

A lot of times it's just observing. It's just showing up and saying, "Oh, what are you doing? How do you feel about that? How does that make you feel?" Or "What are your actual intentions here?" If I have an outside perspective, do I see that there's integrity with what you're saying you're trying to do and what actually might be happening? What that's coalesced into is a program called And Sing!, comes from the title of the song, Lift Every Voice and Sing, the Black National Anthem.

Like an invitation for everybody to live their life and also sing, and to have an open program note, meaning many people don't read the program note when you walk into the concert hall, but that gives context, and it allows invitation for people into what's happening. I wanted to have the conversation that would be the program note the entire time. We're talking to every single conductor, all of the students, making sure that the audience feels free to get up, move around, shout, and what have you, so that the concert ritual is broken down into a communal space of just saying, "We are all here. We can enjoy this together." Which is why I love things like seeing behind the curtain before the show so we all just create a magical reality together. It's not a secret.

Kate Hinds: That concert is happening this Monday night, May 6th at 7:00 PM.

Davóne Tines: Yes.

Kate Hinds: At BAM. People go to the BAM website if you want to check out more information. Lileana, before we let you go, I know you're an extremely busy person. Before I want to ask you a quick question about the Prince musical, but I wanted to give our listeners-- the last time you were on the show, you were here to talk about the Michael R. Jackson performance, White Girl in Danger. We have a clip of Michael R. Jackson and Alison Stewart that I wanted to play so people can just think of like, "We were just hearing opera and a beautiful classically trained voice, and you also can do this."

Alison Stewart: Would you just sing the hook of White Girl in Danger just so the audience can understand it and be stuck with it for the rest of the day?

Michael R. Jackson: Sure. White girl in danger. She's doing drugs, but she won't do her homework.

Kate Hinds: I just want--

[laughter]

Davóne Tines: Yes.

Kate Hinds: It's part of my guiding stars to play that clip as often as I can in as many different circumstances as I can. Look at your range. That's pretty amazing. You are working on the stage adaptation of Prince's Purple Rain musical film. What is it about this type of work that makes you want to take this challenge on?

Lileana Blain-Cruz: Oh, man. It is so wild that you just did that because I'm literally out here singing songs from El Niño, now you just brought back White Girl in Danger in my head, and soon it's going to be Purple rain, purple rain. It's literally like, I love pieces that defy categorization. I love pieces that show us how complex and amazing we are and connect it to spirit and zaniness and strangeness. We are a bunch of weird aliens. I love that about human beings. I'm excited for Purple Rain to open us up again into this incredible portal that Prince has allowed us to feel alive in.

Kate Hinds: Well said. I also just wanted to tell our listeners that tomorrow on WNYC's sister station WQXR, they will be broadcasting El Niño in its entirety as part of its live from the Met Program, which aims to bring opera for free to a broad audience. You won't get to see all the puppets and the magical realism and the beautiful colors of the staging, but you will get to hear Davóne's beautiful voice. Tune into WQXR, that's 105.9 at 1:00 PM tomorrow to hear the Met's production of El Niño. I have been speaking with Director Lileana Blain-Cruz and Davóne Tines. Thank you so much for joining me.

Lileana Blain-Cruz: Thanks for having us.

Davóne Tines: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

 

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