About
The opera was comissioned by Andreas Mitisek at LBO, Mitisek also serving also as dramaturge to composer and librettist
In 1980's New York, five African American and Latino teenagers were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were unjustly convicted of a Central Park rape but exonerated through DNA evidence thirteen years later. Davis' opera is a passionate story about an issue that still rocks America today.
Reviews
The Central Park Five” was given an incredibly effective presentation by Long Beach Opera’s Artistic and General Director Andreas Mitisek and designers Dan Weingarten (Lighting) and Earl Howard (Sound). ... the production was serious and unflinching. Doors and screens were used most effectively, as, for example, when the District Attorney walked through door after door browbeating the five isolated accused into confession (another moment, admittedly, where the “five” were individualized).
Finally, this may be the best work Andreas Mitisek has done as producer and director. The set design is effective, with panels serving alternately as doors, walls and screens for projections. The staging captures both the Harlem milieu with projections and jazz music and the claustrophobia of the holding cells where the boys are interrogated separately, and effortlessly shifts location without a loss of dramatic momentum.
Never an outfit to shrink from a touchy topic, Long Beach Opera presented The Central Park Five as a hard-hitting, straight-forward narrative, without poetic abstractions or doppelgangers doubling the characters or other tics that today’s new operas tend to overuse. Richard Wesley’s libretto stuck to the historical record and stage director Andreas Mitisek, LBO’s multitasking artistic and general director, made economical use of a collection of walls and doors on casters that also served as screens for projections of period headlines and photos.
The set itself (designed by LBO director Andreas Mitisek) facilitates that dynamism, using mobile doors– through which characters continually move in and out– and projection screens to create the boys’ Harlem homes, jail cells and courtroom. Images of tree branches, a hospital room, newspaper headlines and even the opulent decor of Trump Tower visually create place and mood.
Richard Wesley’s libretto lays all of this out and more in straight-forward, easy-to-follow fashion – and LBO chief Mitisek’s stage direction was similarly and consistently on point. The sets were portable walls and doors rolling along the stage on casters, occasionally serving as screens for projected still images and headlines from the period.
Mitisek leaves us with a disillusioning headline projected on a wall, a reminder that coerced confessions and racial profiling are by no means things of the past.
Richard Wesley’s libretto lays all of this out and more in straight-forward, easy-to-follow fashion – and LBO chief Mitisek’s stage direction was similarly and consistently on point. The sets were portable walls and doors rolling along the stage on casters, occasionally serving as screens for projected still images and headlines from the period.
Credits
Warner Grand Theatre