Opera got a lot more interesting when Jake Heggie ‘s “Dead Man Walking” came along in 2000. Suddenly, a 400-year-old genre, best known for silly love affairs and sweeping comedic coincidences, put itself at the center of a serious dialogue on topical issues.
Last year’s biggest premieres — “Oscar,” with its themes of gender discrimination; “Champion,” with its hard look at racism — trace their lineage to “Dead Man Walking,” which turned opera houses into forums for a debate over the death penalty.
Central City Opera has the title on its summer season but the company is already pushing the conversation into the community, with its “Prisons, Compassion and Redemption Project,” a series of talks, readings and films kicking off this week.
On March 12, Sister Helen Prejean, who wrote the original “Dead Man Walking” book about her counseling of a death row inmate, hosts a screening of the 1995 movie made of her story, at the Jewish Community Center in Denver.
The next night, she joins composer Heggie, Arapahoe County District Attorney George H. Brauchler, defense mitigation specialist Greta Lindecrantz and victim advocate Dana Sampson for a symposium on crime and punishment at the Greek Orthodox Metropolis Cathedral in Glendale.
A decade ago, opera companies rarely stepped into the political fray so directly.
“What is great about the piece is that it has been able to open up a dialogue on issues of forgiveness, vengeance, law, life and death, and people are eager to engage in those topics,” said Heggie last week.
“Dead Man Walking,” first produced by the San Francisco Opera, is one of the few recent works to have a vibrant life after its premiere. The title has been presented across North America and in such countries as Australia, Sweden and Germany.
Heggie attributes the success to the work’s sound and simple construction and its libretto, by Tony-winning playwright Terrence McNally, who wrote “Master Class” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”
The piece is an opera, but it spans musical forms, crossing over to popular idioms like jazz, and that makes it accessible to broad audiences.
“The musical world of the opera welcomes them in, it doesn’t keep them at arms length,” he said.
Still, he is surprised at the way the opera plays out in communities where it is performed.
“The opera itself is not about the death penalty,” he said. There’s no moment when the audience has to decide whether the convicted murderer should be executed or not.
“We know the guy is going to die at the start, then we have to figure out the human part of the issue,” Heggie said.
Central City will give its audience plenty of time to figure out such things, including an Interfaith Religious Round Table on the death penalty April 10 at Sturm College of Law at the University of Denver. Reading clubs at the Tattered Cover bookstore and the Denver Public Library will also take on the work.
The discussion will be varied and inclusive, and leads up to the actual production of the work. That’s set for July 5-25 at the Central City Opera House.
For info on the public forums or the production itself, visit centralcityopera.org/project online or call 303-292-6700.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, firstname.lastname@example.org or twitter.com/rayrinaldi