A Revised ‘Harvey Milk,’ Finds Heart in San Francisco

Eighteen years ago this month, Harvey Milk, the gay San Francisco supervisor, was shot several times and killed by an off-balance, homophobic fellow supervisor, Dan White, who also murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone.

In January 1995, in Houston, and then four months later in New York, “Harvey Milk,” the opera by Stewart Wallace that mythologizes Milk as a symbol for the birth of the modern gay rights movement, had a disappointing reception both from critics and, to some extent, audiences.

Moving subject, crazy score--was the general response.

But now “Harvey Milk” has arrived at San Francisco Opera--a co-commissioner along with Houston Grand Opera and New York City Opera--and as San Franciscans like to put it, it has come home. To call the West Coast premiere of the opera a triumph is perhaps a little too strong, but it is close. To merely say that the opera has been warmly embraced here--which it has been by critics, opera lovers and a very diverse and, on Saturday night, riveted audience--is not strong enough.

There is more to the new success of “Harvey Milk” than an audience recognizing itself in the characters on stage. We don’t come to opera, as we do to movies, for that. We come to opera to see the larger context. We may see situations on stage that no longer happen or some that still do. We may see locales that never existed, some that once did and some that still do. It doesn’t really matter. Opera is about neither place nor plot, but the human condition.

“Harvey Milk” universalizes its subject by taking some big risks. The ambitious libretto by Michael Korie uses its title character as the centerpiece for rising gay consciousness in American society. It traces Milk’s transformation from awkward youth and closeted Wall Street Young Republican to unofficial mayor of San Francisco’s Castro District in the rowdy ‘70s and consummate City Hall deal-maker.

It also shows Milk as a Jew growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust. Some have objected to the equating of the persecution of Jews by the Nazis with the persecution of gays, but that is not the point of Korie’s libretto, nor of the beautiful and moving Kaddish music with which Wallace opens and closes the opera. Instead, they show how a sense of persecution can shape a character.

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The main criticism of “Harvey Milk” in Houston and New York, however, revolved around the music, its messy eclecticism--’70s disco here, a neo-romantic grand opera aria there, something experimental somewhere else--and lack of unifying voice. Wallace has made revisions, thinning and clarifying orchestrations, tightening the third act, focusing the assassination action more on the victim and less on the perpetrator. It all helps, but the real reason for the opera’s acceptance now is that San Francisco Opera has mounted it with an enthusiasm that is contagious.

The charm of Milk himself and of the times he lived in was a kind of free-for-all appreciation for life’s diversity. And Wallace’s score now seems artfully made and persuasively suited to its subject, which is not the celebration of one segment of society but rather the realization that we are all in it together.

Little of the sense of celebration in this production came across in New York, where the opera suffered with an incompetent chorus, an uninvolved orchestra, a skeptical audience and an ailing conductor so weak he could barely lift a baton. On the night last year that I attended, half of the Lincoln Center audience didn’t even stay for the devastating third act.

It couldn’t have been more different Saturday night at the Orpheum Theatre, packed with a rapt audience alive to every nuance of the work. Donald Runnicles conducted a dramatically arresting performance. Christopher Alden’s imaginative and tightly focused production had an immediacy impossible in a large opera house. And the cast--with most of the same principals as in Houston and New York, led by the uncannily arresting baritone Robert Orth as Milk--performed with unabashed fervor, perhaps helped by the knowledge that they are about to go into the studio and record it for Teldec.

On Sunday, San Francisco Opera also unveiled a new production by Alden of the Offenbach favorite “Tales of Hoffmann,” in the cavernous Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, which is the other site the company is relying on this season while its home theater, the War Memorial Opera House, undergoes earthquake retrofitting. It is a period staging but stylized by a director once regularly seen at Long Beach Opera but now mainly working in Europe. And it is best seen alongside “Harvey Milk”--how similar, for instance, the old carnivals of Venice seem to latter-day gay pride marches.

The cast, far more famous and almost as good as that of “Harvey Milk,” features a hard-working Jerry Hadley as Hoffmann, Samuel Ramey as usual assuming all the roles manifesting the devil and the American debut of Romanian mezzo-soprano Ruxandra Donose as an alluring Nicklausse. The three sopranos, in order of excellence and appearance, are Tracy Dahl (Olympia), Patricia Racette (Antonia) and Catherine Keen (Giulietta). Steven Mercurio conducts a more sentimental performance than Alden had in mind, but not disastrously so.

There are no plans to bring “Harvey Milk” to Los Angeles, but the next opera by Wallace and Korie, “Hopper’s Wife”--the imagined marriage of Edward Hopper, the painter, and Hedda Hopper, the gossip columnist--will be given by Long Beach Opera in June, a month after it has its premiere in New York, in a production directed by Alden.

* “Harvey Milk” continues Thursday and Nov. 30 at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., and Nov. 27, the 18th anniversary of Milk’s death, at 8:30 p.m., preceded by a memorial candlelight march, Orpheum Theatre, 1192 Market St., San Francisco, $8-$125, (415) 864-3330. “Tales of Hoffmann” continues tonight and Dec. 3, 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, Tuesday and Nov. 29: 8 p.m.; Dec. 1, 2 p.m., Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, 99 Grove St., $8-$125, (415) 864-3330.