Proving Up - Journey North Opera Company

photo by locomotofx

I hope you have had the experience in your life where you see a show, and even though you KNOW you are going to be thinking about it, and realizing aspects of it later you just want to tell everyone you know to go see this show? That is where I am at right now. I just returned home from the Southern Theater and the Minnesota premiere of Missy Mazzoli's opera Proving Up. It is produced and presented by Journey North Opera Company, with which I have some history, and it is a 75 min opera, sung in English that will take you on a wild trip. It was not what I expected at all, and I mean that in the best way possible.

The stage is set with a stunning sod house on the left, made of real sod and open so you can see people inside it. There is a ladder to the side of the house, and you can see a wooden pig on top. In front is a small cemetery with two marked graves. In the back is some fencing behind which you can see a wonderfully crafted wooden horse. On the right side of the stage are some non-specific crop-like plants, set in three bunches. These bunches edge the playing space, and to the right is the 13-piece orchestra conducted by Brian Dowdy. His note in the program gives a good impression of what to expect musically...

"Acoustic guitars struck with percussion mallets. Eerie harmonicas and muted horns. Dusky strings, brash woodwinds, a nagging harpsichord, and a percussive harp. The instrumentation of Mazzoli's score is a darkly prismatic soundscape that haunts the physical and emotional landscape of Proving Up."

This is a modern work so I didn't go in expecting lush orchestrations, and melodies. However the score is so beautifully written that the vocal melodies, and the soundscape of the orchestra are perfectly matched. Both voice and instrument are pushed to show their full range, and some instruments are pushed in a new direction - the six or seven guitars that are hung and then used more percussively than usual. A stunning idea that works so well in this piece. The vocal lines are also pushed at times. Some of the singers I have heard before but never like this. They are using their full range vocally, and emotionally and it is incredible.

photo by locomotofx

I went opening night so I missed the cover cast who sang the preview. I only bring this up because I have seen some of the cover cast sing before and I would have loved to hear them sing this score. The main cast is incredible. The story, based on a short story by Karen Russell, is of the Zegner family who are homesteaders in Nebraska, living in a sod house, trying to prove up so they can own the land they have been working. The Homestead Act of 1862 is mentioned with the guidelines of a house of sod, five years of harvest, acres of grain, and a window of glass. If these requirements were met, the land would be owned by the homesteaders. The surface focus of the opera is having a window of glass. However, like all good works of art, you realize there is so much more going on. Besides Pa (Joel Mathias), Ma (Amy Wolf), Miles (David Walton), and Peter (Joe Allen), there are the two Zegner daughters (Alyssa Burdick, and Kristina Hamilton Butler) who you realize shortly into the work are dead. I don't want to give away too much of the story, but it has tension, and humor, and some spooky aspects to it. There are time-shifts that allow you to see the family when they first arrived, to where they are now, and to some extent how they got to where they are. The direction by Amanda Carlson was inventive and spot-on. Everything about the production from the set, make-up, costumes, lighting, direction...it all worked so well together. I can't think of anything I would change about this production.

It only plays this one weekend so go. Just take a chance and go see this amazing work.