Photo by Brooke Hall

From Ale House to Opera House on North Avenue

Andy Rubin, the owner of Cyclops Books, was standing against the bar in the crowded Liam Flynn’s Ale House. “Opera on North Avenue,” he said. “Can you believe it?”

Rhymes with Opera, a company devoted to “contemporary experimental vocal music,” had received a Station North Arts Grant in order to do precisely the thing that amazed Andy: bring opera to North Avenue.

Though there are venues in the area that serve primarily as performance spaces, Ruby Fulton, a composer and co-founder of RWO arranged to have the works performed at Liam’s because it was a new space with “multiple levels that I thought would look rad.” Doug Buchanan, the composer of the spectacular vocal piece “Goblin Market” (based on the poem by Christina Rossetti) described it to

Fulton as “Tom Waits meets the Decemberists in an Irish bar.”

That was a pretty good description of Buchanan’s “Goblin Market,” as it turned out, except the real thing was even a bit scarier—and more ethereally beautiful— than it sounds. The work had been commissioned by Rhymes With Opera and under Buchanan’s intense conducting, Elisabeth Halliday, Bonnie Lander, and Robert Maril sang Rossetti’s disturbing poem beautifully.

RWO commissioned a second work “Numbers and Dates” from Thomas Limbert, a D.C. based composer. This is ultimately the second in a trilogy of works based on the expression of emotions for RWO.

Both of these works were sung without being acted. But the grant also allowed Fulton to hire Britt Olsen-Ecker as Director and Ryan Haase as a designer.

The third piece KETAMYTH by Ruby Fulton (whose libretto I wrote) had been performed recital style at Artscape this year, but under Olsen-Ecker’s direction— and with the help of silk parachutes, candles, widlly strung mesh and a painting by artist Chris Schaeffer, the singers became actors and an ale house became an opera house. “The Greek chorus theme of KETAMYTH helped me envision the world of the theater that took over Liam’s,” Olsen-Ecker says.

As Bonnie Lander sat atop the bar and sang across the room to Elisabeth Halliday, over by the windows, I was struck by the sparse completeness and beauty of staging. Robert Maril played a young Orpheus type whose girlfriend died in a fire. Dealing with her grief, he took the drug, ketamine, and had a near death experience where he felt “that everyone who had ever lived was there.” The lyrics could have been flat and affectless, but the combination of Fulton’s intense musical composition, George Lam’s conducting, and the amazing emotional and vocal ranges of Lander, Halliday, and Maril brought the words to life in a way I could
never have imagined.

So opera on North Avenue? Hell yes.