Music Review | ’Our Town’: Leaving High Drama Behind For A Trip To Grover’s Corners

Modesty and a taste for the ordinary are not opera’s usual ingredients. Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” in the operatic version by Ned Rorem, came to the Juilliard Opera Center on Wednesday night. Its just-folks serenity could only be American.

There are no big people doing grand things in turn-of-the-20th-century Grover’s Corners, U.S.A., nor are there little people doing violence to one another on the grand scale that opera expects. In “Our Town” getting up and having breakfast are events as major an any. It’s not something Puccini would have understood.

By definition “Our Town” is also about a place, not a set of principal singers, although in its rank-and-file of equals the lovers George and Emily are more equal than anybody else. Absent is the dramatic arc that takes stories and people from A to B. Here unfolding events are broken into pieces, rearranged out of order and frozen in time.

Wilder’s play and, happily, Mr. Rorem’s setting of it are sweet-tempered without being sugar-coated. Death and the unhappinesses it leaves behind are as much topics as life and its small pleasures.

Mr. Rorem’s music builds on favorite hymns and sings with a familiar tunefulness subjected to touches of acid. The Juilliard Orchestra, conducted by Anne Manson, makes important use of the piano. Mr. Rorem’s vocal style could possibly be described as one continuous horizontal flow, but I like to think of it as a series of closely connected, self-sufficient arias.

Mr. Rorem does acknowledge grand opera by elevating the soprano role of Emily to something wide-ranging and declamatory. Jennifer Zetlan, who played the role at the Aspen Music Festival two years ago, sings beautifully and affectingly. The part could not be in better hands.

Alex Mansoori (the Stage Manager) and Alek Shrader (George) are solid and convincing. The singing citizenry of Grover’s Corners includes Marc Webster, Jessica Klein, David McFerrin, Renée Tatum, Julie Boulianne and Nicholas Bentivoglio.

Edward Berkeley’s direction adheres to the tone of simplicity that “Our Town” brings with it. John Kasarda’s set is a deep, blank stage with straight-back chairs arranged and rearranged. The story of J. D. McClatchy’s libretto is operatic in itself: Wilder didn’t want his play as an opera, refusing applications by eminences like Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. In 2001, the Wilder estate gave in.

Mr. McClatchy rejiggers and condenses. He has to. Music and words move at different speeds, and when opera kowtows to original texts the results are usually fatal. Ask Verdi.

Our Town is repeated Friday night and Sunday afternoon at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 155 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center; (212) 721-6500.

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