The production will be staged at the Ecclesia church instead of the company's usual home, the Wortham Center.
Individuals walked around at a homeless encampmentThursday Nov. 9, 2017 near downtown Houston, Texas.Houston Grand Opera’s next world premiere will look and feel differently from the 73 that preceded it. “Another City” focuses on a community in plain sight yet unseen by many: Houston’s homeless population.
Composer Jeremy Howard Beck and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann’s opera, which premieres Thursday at Ecclesia Houston’s downtown campus, takes a 360 approach to the subject: some of its characters live on the street; others minister to them. One, known as The Navigator, falls somewhere in between. Distilling such a vast topic, and about 60 hours of interviews, into a cohesive dramatic work was about as difficult as it sounds, the creators admit.
Beck and Fleischmann, who previously collaborated on “The Long Walk,” American Lyric Theater’s 2015 adaptation of Iraq War veteran Brian Castner’s memoir, took two 10-day research trips to Houston. During the first, they got what Fleischmann calls the “30,000-foot view” from policymakers, listening to what works and what doesn’t. The second trip was to the front lines, where they heard of innumerable ways people become homeless. Stories of addiction, eviction, and incarceration were commonplace.
“Another City” is part of HGO’s long-running Song of Houston initiative, and Fleischmann wrote local homeless-services non-profits such as the Beacon, Live Oak Friends meeting house, and SEARCH directly into her libretto.
Rather than use the episodic structure of many operas — recitative, aria, chorus, and so forth — Beck wanted “Another City” to feel more symphonic, with different characters represented by musical motifs. One is consistently accompanied by finger-picked guitar. Another is steeped in Motown and doo-wop; still another gets a “super-classical” tenor aria.
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