United States Stewart Wallace, Harvey Milk Reimagined: Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of Opera Parallèle / Nicole Paiement (conductor). Blue Shield of California Theatre, San Francisco, 31.5.2025. (HS)
Stewart Wallace’s Harvey Milk Reimagined takes a big step up from the original mid-1990s opera which delved into the life of an activist who was the first openly gay man elected to office in a major American city. He was assassinated a year later, along with the city’s liberal mayor, by a fellow member of San Francisco’s board of supervisors.
In death, Milk’s image as a gay rights pioneer was cemented.
The opera’s revision, a write-through of both the music and Michael Korie’s libretto, was scheduled to debut in 2020 at San Francisco’s Opera Parallèle, but it was shelved by the COVID shutdown. Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, which co-commissioned this new version, debuted it in 2022, and the piece has finally made it to San Francisco. It is a homecoming: Harvey Milk made his name in San Francisco. The original opera was a co-commission of San Francisco Opera, New York City Opera and Houston Grand Opera, and was championed by David Gockley when he was managing director in Houston. He commissioned Wallace’s next opera, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, when he joined San Francisco in 2006. The score is dedicated to Gockley.
The revision pared down the original three acts to two, cut some 25 minutes from the score and trimmed the original cast of more than 80 down to 31. ‘Reimagined’ was the approach to the story and music. This new version has fewer crowd scenes and explanations of cultural aspects which weighed down the original. After all, a widely distributed film starring Sean Penn and Josh Brolin brought the story to the masses in 2008.
Harvey Milk Reimagined tells the story accurately (if not quite completely), and it puts more focus on Milk’s Jewish upbringing, dovetailed with his advocacy for gay rights. The story arc remains the same, after a stylized opening depiction of the assassination. It begins in the 1940s in New York, as young Harvey’s mother sends him to a Metropolitan Opera performance of Tosca where all the opera-loving ‘men without wives’ fascinate him. A burgeoning career on Wall Street requires him to hide his homosexuality. He falls for Scott, a political activist, and they move to San Francisco in the early 1970s, where they see gay people out and around. Harvey’s camera shop becomes a focal point for the neighborhood community.
After witnessing a gay-bashing murder, Milk runs for a seat on the board of supervisors. That fails, but he succeeds in 1978. Political tensions and a mentally unstable homophobic supervisor lead to tragedy.
Impressive voices in all the major roles and vital conducting by Nicole Paiement brought out the emotional intensity of the music. Stage director Brian Staufenbiel and set designer Jacquelyn Scott conceived a fluid production with four rolling flights of stairs combining seamlessly to suggest the various locales, backed by an array of hanging (closet?) doors on which David Murakami’s projections morphed from scenery backgrounds to newspaper headlines and news clips of the real-life characters and helped to anchor the story in reality. In a particularly poignant use of the scenery, the profoundly moving final scene portrayed a vigil outside City Hall that brought out thousands of San Franciscans after the assassinations on 27 November 1979.
The three major characters in the cast were all making company debuts. Michael Kelly wielded a lithe lyric baritone that conveyed the title character’s early in-the-closet angst, a growing out-of-the-closet bravado and the final shaping of a persona that helped win his election after a previous failure. A projected clip preceded Act II, with the real Harvey Milk debating a state proposition that would have required firing gay teachers and out-talking the proposition’s author (and showed how Kelly looked a lot like Milk).
As Scott Smith, Milk’s life partner (this was decades before gay partners could marry legally), Henry Benson matched Kelly’s lyric sound with his tenor voice. He also conveyed the character’s activist passion which helped set Milk on his way to political success.
Perhaps the best voice in the cast was the villain in the story – Christopher Oglesby as Dan White, the former cop and fireman who won a seat on the board of supervisors in the same election as Milk and murdered both him and Mayor George Moscone. He wielded a ringing tenor; I would call it a budding heldentenor. In early scenes, he appears as a cop in New York busting gay men in Central Park, and his voice underlined the character’s dangerous force in events leading to the denouement.
The other striking voice was the big, round bass of Matt Boehler as Moscone, who had a strong stage presence. He also doubled as other characters in Act 1, including an ex-German acquaintance in New York who won’t condemn the Nazi regime and a teamster in San Francisco who makes a political deal to support Milk.
Veteran mezzo-soprano Catherine Cook (a local, who lives in neighboring Daly City) lent her supple voice to Harvey’s mother, whose first scene connects reminiscences of the Holocaust with a warning about ‘different’ men he might meet at the opera. Mama may not be as fleshed-out a character as she could have been, but her reappearance in the final scene was moving.
Countertenor Matheus Coura as The Messenger was another outstanding voice, a supernatural figure that only Harvey can see and who helps him realize things he needs to accept. A baby-faced Curtis Resnick played the young Harvey and sang the music with charm.
The chorus sounded great, even if too many could not find a believable way to portray the LGBTQ characters realistically, which did no favors to the crowd scenes.
An unfortunate downside of this production was the sound design, or at least its execution. Amplification made some of the voices ear-splitting, especially Oglesby’s – his hefty voice needed no help. What worked best in this revised production, as happens in much musical theater, whether opera or musicals, were moments when the action slowed down and the music could capsulize the effect of what was happening. The scenes that made the most impact were the ones in which Harvey and Scott kindle their relationship, Milk and Moscone have a heart-to-heart conversation about the dangers of politics, and the extended vigil scene at the end.
It only makes this tale more important that the rights of gay and trans Americans are at increasing risk today.
Harvey Steiman
Production:
Director & Concept – Brian Staufenbiel
Sets – Jacquelyn Scott
Costumes – Alina Bokovikova
Projections – David Murakami
Hair & Makeup – Y. Sharon Peng
Lighting – Mextly Couzin
Libretto – Michael Korie
Chorus director – Jaco Wong
Cast:
Harvey Milk – Michael Kelly
Dan White – Christopher Oglesby
Scott Smith – Henry Benson
Mama – Catherine Cook
Young Harvey – Curtis Resnick
George Moscone – Matt Boehler
Dianne Feinstein – Marnie Breckenridge
Messenger – Matheus Coura
Anne Kronenberg – Gabriela Stoloff-Báez
Henrietta Wong – Chea Kang
Jack – Bradley Kynard