Dallas Opera’s ‘Great Scott’ pulls together dream team

When composer Jake Heggie received another commission to create a new work for the Dallas Opera in 2010 — just after his successful Moby-Dick had premiered there — he leaned in for an idea from the man who has been instrumental in all five of Heggie’s full-length operas: Tony-winning playwright and musical book writer Terrence McNally.

Heggie and McNally created Dead Man Walking for the San Francisco Opera in 2000, and it has since become one of the world’s most performed operas written in the past three of four decades.

Heggie had wanted to work with McNally again, so when McNally’s schedule came open, they talked about potential works to adapt.

“Out of the blue he said, ‘How about I write something original?’ ” Heggie says. “It was incredibly bold. Most operas and musicals are based on some source because it stimulates something in [the audience’s] imagination that they know already.”

McNally had the premise: An opera superstar named Arden Scott returns to her hometown to save the struggling opera company where her career began, and it’s in the same town where the professional football team is headed to its first Super Bowl. A wealthy opera benefactor is married to the NFL team’s owner.

The story also involves a ghost and an original opera-inside-the-opera, a bel canto work that Heggie had to create music for as well.

The result, Great Scott, opens Friday and runs in repertory with TDO’s latest version of Puccini’s Tosca, which opens Nov. 6. Great Scott later became a co-commission with the San Diego Opera, which, a few years ago, made headlines for being on the verge of folding.

“After Moby-Dick, I felt very supported by the Dallas community and wanted to do another one,” Heggie says.

There was another stipulation with this commission that affected Heggie’s and McNally’s choice of story: Mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who has become a mega opera star in recent years, would be attached. Heggie had wanted to write something for her for years.

“When Jake came to me and said, ‘I have to write an opera for you. Let’s find the place to do it,’ it prompted months of emailing and exploring different topics and ideas,” DiDonato says.

“I can’t think of another artistic proposal that has ever been more thrilling (nor daunting) than this beautiful chain of events, and now that we are full-steam into the process, I have never had a more rewarding artistic experience,” she says.

DiDonato is not the only heavyweight collaborator on this project.

Also in the cast: renowned mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, or “Flicka,” as she’s known; baritone Nathan Gunn; rising soprano Ailyn Perez; and countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo.

The set designer is multiple Tony winner Bob Crowley; the conductor is Patrick Summers, a frequent Heggie collaborator who also conducted Moby-Dick; and the choreographer is John de los Santos, a Texas Christian University alum who has directed for Fort Worth Opera and around the country.

And then, there’s the director.

Jack O’Brien is a legendary Broadway director who has won three Tonys and been nominated for seven more. He has done musicals (Hairspray and The Full Monty), but is known for plays by major playwrights such as Shakespeare, Tom Stoppard and August Wilson.

In 2016, Stoppard’s latest, The Hard Problem, directed by O’Brien, will open on Broadway. Among O’Brien’s opera credits are the groundbreaking, Houston-generated production of Porgy and Bess that has appeared on Broadway and toured the country for decades; and in an interesting cycle, he made his opera directing debut with Handel’s Dido and Aeneas at the Dallas Opera in 1972.

Texas connections

O’Brien isn’t the only one who had an opera breakthrough in Dallas. Although McNally was born in Corpus Christi, and left for New York from there when he was 17, for three years in middle school, he lived in Dallas.

He attended Christ the King Catholic School, and his parents took him to the Dallas Opera and the summer musicals at Fair Park.

“That’s when I first got bitten by the opera bug,” McNally says. “I sent off to Sam Goody record club to hear these albums. I was going to be a writer, but I’m very aware of musical structure in my writing.”

His opera influence has been most obvious in his Tony-winning play Master Class, about Maria Callas — who, incidentally, performed several times at Dallas Opera in the 1950s — and in 1989’s The Lisbon Traviata, which deals with gay Callas fans.

“I used to listen to music while I wrote to set the mood,” he says. “I wasn’t writing to music. I had it on while I was writing.”

McNally’s other plays include the Tony-winning Love! Valour! Compassion! and the controversial Corpus Christi, which retells part of the New Testament book of Matthew from a gay perspective. When that play opened in New York, there were death threats. A 2010 student production of Corpus at Tarleton State University also caused controversy.

His love for the arts, and his concern for how they’re treated in American society and by politicians — as well as by more conservative programmers — are all inspirations for Great Scott.

In the Dallas Opera season brochure’s description of the work, it says Great Scott sparks these challenging questions: “What purpose is served by the arts? How do leisure activities shape our society and our common humanity? Do great music and drama answer a need that nothing else can fill?”

“All the arts are struggling, and theaters have gotten more conservative in their repertory,” McNally says.

He has collaborated with a number of composers for such musicals as Ragtime, The Full Monty and Catch Me If You Can, and finds a particularly close kinship with Heggie.

“I’m not an ironic writer; I’m not post-modern. I want to communicate with my audience in the way Jake does,” McNally says. “His music is very accessible.”

O’Brien, who has worked with McNally before, thinks that’s being modest.

“Terrence doesn’t write about one thing in the way Tom Stoppard doesn’t write about one thing,” O’Brien says. “In Great Scott, you’re watching a very human situation that resonates on several different levels. Terrence is fascinated at this point in his life with holding up a mirror. These last plays and libretti that are tumbling out of him now are universally and thematically theatrical.”

This story was originally published October 21, 2015 at 11:48 AM with the headline "Dallas Opera’s ‘Great Scott’ pulls together dream team."