OPERA REVIEW : Tippett’s Sci-Fi Fairy Tale ‘New Year’ Opens at Wortham

In “New Year,” the fifth opera by the dean of British composers, 84-year-old Sir Michael Tippett, the reclusive central character clinches her psychological liberation by slamming a door behind her. But she’s no Hedda Gabler. The heroine’s escape from fear lacks cathartic punch because Tippett’s jazzy but uninvolving score doesn’t build grippingly to the climactic exit, which is made in anticlimactic silence.

In Tippett’s Space Age fairy tale, given its world premiere Friday in Cullen Theater of Wortham Theater Center, a visitor from the future (called Nowhere Tomorrow) helps a reclusive would-be doctor brave the frightening urban realities of Somewhere Today.

Pelegrin enters Jo Ann’s life on New Year’s Eve, the traditional time for new beginnings. With his support, Jo Ann chooses to face her responsibility to orphans like herself and Donny, her hyperactive, Caribbean-born foster brother. Jo Ann’s decision releases her latent courage and commitment and, as the always-onstage narrator calls for the universal dream of “one humanity, one justice,” Jo Ann leaves her room to face the city Tippett calls Terror Town.

Co-commissioned by Houston Grand Opera, Glyndebourne Festival Opera and the British Broadcasting Corp. (which will videotape the Glyndebourne production), Tippett’s brashly eclectic, rhythmically complex, feistily youthful opera is heavily influenced by pop/rock and the dance-filled Broadway musical.

“New Year’s” 50-member orchestra calls for two electric guitars, three saxophones, a battery of jazz percussion instruments and even two brake drums. The narrator was performed by a long-haired, chest-miked show vocalist. There is a rap-style duet between the opera’s two black characters, the incorrigible Donny and Regan, Pelegrin’s Amazonian commanding officer.

Bill T. Jones’ choreography, a major element in Sir Peter Hall’s animated and detailed staging, blends modern and jazz dance with ballet. Thus Terror Town’s roving gangs behave like Sharks and Jets, Donny sometimes breaks into a Charleston and, to celebrate her emotional liberation, Jo Ann joins two dancers in a springy pas de trois.

Allison Chitty’s high-tech sets and Paul Pyant’s lighting are striking, but the jagged vocal writing proves as awkward and ungrateful as some of Sir Michael’s prose (the New Year’s Eve revelers sing “Mummers and mountebanks and malcontents are much among us”). But music director John DeMain’s crisp conducting lovingly caressed such lyrical moments as Jo Ann’s dreamily melismatic duets with Pelegrin and with Nan, her stern foster mother.

Soprano Helen Field made a creamy-toned and sympathetic Jo Ann. Tenor Peter Kazaras sang Pelegrin with transparent if often strained tone. Gazelle-like athleticism and dark, muscular tone made Swedish baritone Krister St. Hill a vivid Donny.

Richetta Manager’s richly gleaming soprano fearlessly negotiated Regan’s vocal lines, which are daunting zigzags covering two octaves. John Schiappa’s singing as The Presenter was strenuous and hoarse but potent, nonetheless.

Baritone James Maddalena made a striking, if characteristically starchy, Merlin, the computer wizard who built Pelegrin’s space ship. Mezzo-soprano Jane Shaulis’ Nan boasted big, commanding tone and the best enunciation in the cast.