Perhaps not since Lieutenant Pinkerton kept a secret from Cio-Cio San has an opera tried to address transparency issues in the military. But with the blessing of Julian Assange himself, a Melbourne opera company has begun workshopping a new production based on the life of the mysterious WikiLeaks founder. As Opera Australia artistic director Lyndon Terracini told the Australian Broadcasting Company: “He is an incredible character, and it is an exciting idea. What they came up with was really terrific. What's great is that it speaks to a younger audience." Added Eddie Perfect, who played Assange in some of the workshops: "It's got everything that a dramatic musical work needs. It's got heroes and villains. In fact, it's got a hero and villain combined in one."
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Written by Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee, Jerry Springer: The Opera ran for two years in London and won four Olivier Awards, including Best New Musical. Based on Springer’s outrageous talk show, the wildly profane production featured such classic confrontations as Jesus and Satan, Adam and Eve, and dancing KKK members. But in 2008, three years after the show moved from the West End to New York for a two-night performance at Carnegie Hall, Jerry Springer: The Opera received disappointing reviews and closed.
Anna Nicole Smith’s life was already such a tragic soap opera that turning it into an actual production with arias wasn’t a great stretch. So in 2011, British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and Richard Thomas, the librettist of Jerry Springer: The Opera, set the late Playboy Playmate’s story to music, complete with a billionaire husband in a wheelchair. When the production opened at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden (which commissioned the work), New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini declared: “Mr. Turnage and Mr. Thomas have given us a tragic operatic heroine, a downtrodden nobody determined to make it, to ‘rape the American dream,’ as she puts it, any way she can. Their Anna Nicole is in the lineage of Bizet’s Carmen, Berg’s Lulu and the Weill-Brecht Jenny.”
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Abraham Lincoln didn’t have much luck at the theater, and apparently neither did John F. Kennedy. In 1997, JFK: A Musical Drama, with music by Will Holt and a book by Will Holt and Tom Sawyer, opened in Dublin. And closed after just 10 performances. “Can you remember where you were, the night they said ‘JFK’ had been shut?” the Irish Times wrote, cheekily. “They aimed to tell the John F. Kennedy story in terms of personal drama, but their selection of material provides only a superficial look at their subject, and nothing that recreates the catharsis of real life.”
Coming shortly after the triumphant 2009 run of Rod Blagojevich Superstar—during which Blago himself made an appearance one night—Chicago’s Second City staged a production of Rush Limbaugh! The Musical. Alas, the show didn’t give critics a rush. As Rick Perlstein wrote for The Daily Beast: “The show lacks a tenth of the fizz the malignant but gifted Limbaugh decants every single afternoon.”
The setting worked for Puccini’s Turandot, so why not John Adams’s Nixon in China? Inspired by the president’s meeting with Mao Zedong in 1972, Adams’s opera debuted at the Houston Grand Opera in 1987 in a production directed by Peter Sellars and choreographed by Mark Morris. Though Nixon in China received mixed reviews, it has been staged several times since the original production, including last April at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House.
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The saga of Sacco and Vanzetti—the Italian anarchists who were convicted of a murder they may not have committed—has been set to music several times since their execution in 1927, including two operas. In 1964, American composer Marc Blitzstein died before he could complete his magnum opus, a three-act opera that the Metropolitan Opera had already optioned. In 2001, Leonard Lehrman completed the work. That same year, Anton Coppola, uncle of director Francis Ford Coppola, staged his own Sacco and Vanzetti production in Tampa. “The opera is full of memorable moments, such as the impromptu singing and dancing in a cafe scene, or the extended multi-part singing, handled with great flair, in the courtroom,” Opera News wrote. “Accompanied by loud orchestral chords, the street demonstrations, counter-demonstrations and nerve-wracking buildup to the men’s offstage executions in the final scene made an especially vivid impact.”
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Richard Wagner had Lohengrin, but for American composer Randall Hutchins, the 44th president is the hero of Hope: The Obama Musical, which debuted in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2010. Featuring characters based on John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Hillary Clinton, the musical told the story of Obama’s rise and 2008 election victory. "This musical is not about politics but about the effect Obama has on people," Hutchins told Time about the show. "Making the musical resembled Obama's story in a way. We had very little in the beginning, meager means, a meager budget ... Obama inspired me to reach higher."
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There were seven singing children in the Von Trapp family, but to stage Octomom: The Musical in 2010 required casting eight. “I'm telling a story about people who just can't have enough," director Chris Voltaire told The Early Show. Added Molly McCook, who played Nadya Suleman herself: "Like, Octo, the way that I make her, she's a little crazy because she really wants money. She really wants to be famous. And she needs it. And then when she doesn't get it, she goes crazy."
The parallels to Verdi’s Otello were already obvious, so why not turn the O. J. Simpson saga into a musical? In 2004, composer Bebe McGarry began setting the notorious trial to music, including the toe-tappin’ number “My Name Is Johnnie Cochran.” Though the project was clearly conceived to be a not-guilty pleasure, when McGarry started looking for backers, former Simpson prosecutor Christopher Darden was not amused. “If I believed someone would invest in such a thing, I’d have a reaction,” he told New York magazine. “But tell her she better not take anything from my book or I’ll sue her ass.”
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