"Aging Magician" Is Ageless Opera Theater

What just happened? That was the tacit question from the May 14 audience at San Diego Opera's presentation of Aging Magician.

The one hour and 20-minute opera-theater ended to dead silence from a stunned, enraptured audience. Then the applause started, audience members stood up, and the cheering lasted a full four minutes. This, despite empty seats in the Balboa Theater and a tiny two-day run.

Whence cometh this response? Aging Magician is the very beautiful and mysterious story of a clockmaker observing his own death as he tries to complete his story of an aging magician, but actually his book of life in which he hopes for a successor. Rinde Eckert (rindeckert.com) wrote the libretto and stars as Harold the clockmaker. The magical setting is the F train to Coney Island designed by Julian Crouch. Eckert's companions are the Brooklyn Youth Chorus -- 29 teenage girls who sing like angels conducted by their founder, Dianne Berkun Menaker--and the brilliant Attaca Quartet (two violins, viola and cello played by Amy Schroeder, Domenic Salerni, Nathan
Schram and Andrew Yee).

Paola Prestini composed the music. Joshua Higgason designed remarkable rear projection and lighting, while Amy Rubin designed the ingenious set and clever costumes. And what of instrument designer Mark Stewart and Sound Engineer Marc Urselli, both extraordinary. The whole team is what you find on a regular basis in New York. Wildly creative and original.

Creative producer Beth Morrison helmed the co-creators, Eckert, Prestini and Crouch, to bring this ground-breaking new work to the wide world. Not for nothing is Morrison called "a contemporary opera mastermind," a "disruptor" who makes opera-theatre happen.

In a brief onstage introduction, San Diego Opera director David Bennett emphasized the company's new direction: using the human voice to transform and express all manner of human experience, sung, spoken and in choral ensembles. Aging Magician delivers all three. In a virtuoso turn, Eckert sings in a soaring baritone, acts, tells deadpan jokes, rides a bicycle, and struggles to contain the pages of his large book. The pages cover the cyclorama when they are not fluttering down to the stage or being held up by the chorus members. Eckert converses often via a prop phone with his worried sister, who makes him sandwiches in an effort to stave off what she fears is starvation (bodily, if not spiritual).

Ultimately, the magician/clockmaker is encased in the golden inner workings of a clock as he embarks on the end of life. Passing time, a theme of this work, is the uncontrollable element of life; it passes when you don't want it to, when you least need it, or when it becomes your own familiar stranger, as timesmith Julius Fraser wrote in his landmark book.

Bennett urges the San Diego County public to pay attention to new works of opera-theater like Aging Magician. He's right. As the May 14-15 audiences discovered, pure magic shows up when you least expect it. Let them know you want more at sdopera.org.