BU Today feature: CFA Tackles Tobias Picker Opera Based on a Stephen King Novel
This article was originally published in BU Today on February 19, 2019. By Joel Brown.
Murder, dementia, domestic abuse, a broken family—Stephen King’s novel Dolores Claiborne has all the torment and passion of any tragic opera. Composer Tobias Picker thought so, too, and in 2013, he turned King’s best-selling psychological drama into an opera, with a libretto by J. D. McClatchy.
Now, a chamber version of Picker’s opera, co-commissioned with the BU Opera Institute, opens this Thursday at the Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre.
“It’s about humanity at its most challenged, and I don’t want to say depraved, but certainly its most raw,” says Dolores Claiborne director Jim Petosa, a College of Fine Arts professor of directing and dramatic criticism and School of Theatre director.
Picker’s operas have been produced to critical acclaim by such respected companies as the Metropolitan Opera, the Santa Fe Opera, and the San Francisco Opera. But the Opera Institute remains at the top of Picker’s list.
“They’ve done some of the best productions of my operas that have ever been done,” Picker says. “The Thérèse Raquin they did is, I think, the most extraordinary production of any opera of mine that I’ve ever seen, anywhere.”
In addition to that 2009 staging, the institute, led by artistic director William Lumpkin, a CFA associate professor of music, opera, mounted a critically praised production of Picker’s Emmeline in 2017. Now, along with the Schools of Music and Theatre, it’s adding a third Picker work to its repertoire, staging the New England premiere of the Dolores Claiborne chamber version. Lumpkin again conducts the orchestra.
The opera, with two casts, will have four performances and run Thursday through Sunday at the Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre. As is typical with productions at the Booth, the producers are pushing the envelope and using the venue’s capabilities to maximum effect. Not to spoil anything, but the Dolores Claiborne opera will take audiences to new depths—literally.
“This new theater says, ‘What are you going to do with me?’” according to Petosa. “This space inspires us to find new dimensions of the play and make it a 21st-century production, and that has been really fun.”
Picker’s Dolores Claiborne premiered in its original version at the San Francisco Opera in 2013. And although King might seem an unlikely source for an opera, Picker says, people who think of him as only a horror writer are missing what an extraordinary storyteller he is. This piece is a grimly realistic tale of family, an unhappy marriage, and murder on an island off the Maine coast, and Picker compares it—loosely—to Puccini’s Tosca in its tale of a woman who kills for an understandable reason and the price she pays. (The novel was later made into a film starring Oscar-winner Kathy Bates in the title role.)