🎭 ChicagoOpera world premiere about Alan Turing is well-crafted and gut-wrenching. | ✍️ DeannaIsaacs
returned for a two-performance world premiere at the Harris Theater last week, conducted by COT music director Lidiya Yankovskaya. It’s a gut-wrenching piece in a well-crafted production, with two major themes that couldn’t be more contemporary: the LGBTQ+ struggle for justice and our rapidly evolving relationship with artificial intelligence.
Turing, a lifelong “eccentric” , was a pioneering English mathematician and computer scientist, a father of AI, and the key player in cracking the German military code in WWII—a feat that saved untold lives and helped to end the war. He was also gay at a time when homosexual relationships were illegal in Britain. A few short years after his then still-secret heroism, the country he had served so well arrested and prosecuted him for consensual homosexual activity.
and of the visual projections that are an important part of the set. I’m not a big fan of the now commonplace use of projections as set components , but in this production—directed by Peter Rothstein, with scenic design that evokes the digital world by architect Benjamin Olsen, and projections by Anthony Churchill—they are astutely employed.
Ditto for the chorus, often seated above the action, commenting and participating in it. Chen’s orchestral and choral music is, by turns, innovative and lyrical, and the rest of her vocal score—which, like much of new opera, leans into recitative—is dramatic. Baritone Jonathan Michie fully projects Turing’s social awkwardness and his emotional pain ; tenor Joseph Leppek is his loyal boyhood friend and abiding love—lost to tuberculosis in his late teens.
The second act struck me as too long in the workshop performance and still seems long, flirting with anticlimax as it lingers over Turing’s imagined posthumous transmigration into an ecstatic digital eternity where he’s reunited with Christopher. But Turing anticipated the mind-machine meld that—nearly 70 years after his death—is an ever more real possibility.
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