This Coming-of-Age Tale Keeps on Coming

Mark Adamo’s opera version of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel “Little Women” isn’t the first such adaptation. But it might be the most significant.

Premiered by Opera Studio of Houston Grand Opera in 1998, it was such a hit that the company revived it as a main-stage production in 2000. Opera Pacific has picked it to kick off its new American Opera series. It opens Saturday and runs through May 20 at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

Hollywood has always loved the coming-of-age story of sisters Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth March growing up in Civil War-era New England. Actresses from Katharine Hepburn to June Allyson to Winona Ryder have played the role of Jo, Alcott’s alter ego.

Not counting Adamo’s version, which was composed to his libretto, there have been five earlier musical adaptations: an opera, an operetta, a television play and two Broadway versions. More are coming.

“I hear that there are not one but two versions for the theater that are being attempted for this coming season,” Adamo said. “But we’ll have been there first.”

For all the story’s popularity, however, Adamo initially had misgivings about the project.

“I was bewildered as to what the real core of the piece was about,” he said. “The character observations are very precise, but the narrative is all over the place. I didn’t know if I could find any architecture in the piece.”

He knew he wanted to use the four key episodes in all of the film versions: Meg’s acceptance of John Brooke’s proposal, Jo’s rejection of Laurie’s comparable proposal, Beth’s death, and the late romance between Jo and Professor Bhaer. But how to put them together?

“I couldn’t find a way to link them for the longest time,” he said. Then he saw Allyson’s face in the 1949 film when Jo reacts to Beth and Brooke embracing. What Jo feared most, he felt, was change: her sisters growing up and abandoning her.

“Jo’s real fight throughout the entire piece is not to become Virginia Woolf. Her career is not as germane to this piece--I suggest--as the emotional journey, which is to keep the family together. She wants to maintain that magical core. And, of course, it’s doomed.”

Adamo easily relates to the family issue. The fourth of five children (he has two brothers and two sisters), Adamo, 38, was born and raised outside of Philadelphia in a household in which silence was the exception.

“The only time [in the novel] Beth’s concentration is broken is when there’s no noise in the house. I can absolutely relate to that.”

Adamo trained as a theater songwriter at New York University, but he began getting commissions for classical music shortly after moving to Washington, D.C., to study composition at Catholic University and direct a church choir.

Those early compositions, mostly chamber music and choral works, led to the “Little Women” commission, his first opera. It took him about nine months to write. Before composing a single note, however, he wrote two outlines, storyboards of a sort, each with surprising strictures.

“I imagined I’m sitting in the theater as the completed opera unspools. Unfortunately, I’m deaf and I’m unfortunately unable to speak the language in which it was written. So what do I know? What can I tell about this story simply from the actions of the characters?

“Then I did the opposite. I said, unfortunately, this time I am blind. I still do not speak the language, but I am hearing the voices and I’m hearing the orchestra.

“But I’m only hearing the voices as vocal gestures. Now, given that, what do I know about this aria? What is the musical material telling me?”

He pursued this unusual route because “I wanted to come at it from as many ways as possible before I got to actual [musical] material, because opera stands or falls, really, not on the quality of its music or its libretto, but on its structure--how the dramatic process is etched through time.

“So you get into thinking about material before you spin out a line, which as [composer] John Corigliano will tell you is sort of like a sculptor beginning with a finger and then saying, ‘Gee, is this going to be the finger of Winston Churchill or Barbra Streisand?’ ”

What he learned was that he wanted to avoid “something between fake Brahms and fake Copland.” His success at that has led Houston to commission two new operas from him over the next six seasons. The first of these, an adaptation of Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” is set to open March 8.

“It’s a lovely thing to do after this piece because it poses exactly the opposite problem to ‘Little Women,’ ” Adamo said. “ ‘Little Women’ was full of psychological detail and rich characterization, but had no architecture. ‘Lysistrata’ is all architecture and no character.”

* “Little Women,” Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Saturday, May 16, 18 and 19, 7:30 p.m.; Sunday and May 20, 2 p.m. $35-$60. (Children, 6-17, $12 to $25). (949) 854-4646.