Riverside Theatre in Iowa City staging its first opera

IOWA CITY — Is “Scalia/Ginsburg” an opera or a play with music? Is it a comedy or a play with lots of humor rolled in?

After some friendly deliberation during a recent roundtable interview with The Gazette, music director/conductor Michael Sakir and artistic director Adam Knight proclaimed Riverside Theatre’s next offering an opera and a comedy.

Audiences can weigh the issues and draw their own conclusions from the hourlong show by Derrick Wang, running Sept. 5 to 15 on the downtown Iowa City stage.

Just don’t trip over the word “opera.” This is not a piece full of high drama in a language most Americans don’t speak. This one is in English, and snippets of famous arias are tucked throughout the score, adding a familiar shimmer with the most recognizable riffs from Handel, Mozart, Verdi, Bizet, Strauss, Puccini and others. Sakir will conduct a seven-piece orchestra with piano, strings and percussion.

Common ground

The late Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia sat on opposite sides of the political divide, but liberal RBG and “fierce” conservative Scalia found their common ground in their love of good food and great opera. They even performed as supernumeraries (crowd scene “extras”) in a 1994 production of “Ariadne auf Naxos” in Washington, D.C.

If you go

What: “Scalia/Ginsburg”

Where: Riverside Theatre, 119 E. College St., Iowa City

When: Sept. 5 to 15; 7:30 p.m. Thursday to Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday

Tickets: $15 to $39, riversidetheatre.org/scaliaginsburg

Post-show talkback: Following the Sept. 8 matinee; featuring the performers, director and host Miriam Gilbert; free and open to the public

Crafting the motto “We are Different. We are one,” Wang’s website bio says the show’s award-winning composer and writer “demonstrates the power of the arts to transcend intellectual and ideological divides.”

He knows a bit about that. With music degrees from Harvard and Yale, and a law degree from the University of Maryland, he teaches interdisciplinary courses in music and law at the Johns Hopkins Peabody Institute in Baltimore.

Wang was a law student when he started working on the opera, bringing it to the Supreme Court in 2013 and to the stage in 2015, with Ginsburg in the audience.

She declared it “a dream come true,” and saw it several times before she died in 2020. Scalia also was aware of the piece before his death in 2016.

“They (both) commented on it to the composer, who happens to be a constitutional lawyer, but the piece went through substantial revisions after Scalia’s passing,” Sakir said.

Opera operations

While the complex and demanding “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812” stretched Riverside Theatre’s musical wings in 2022, “Scalia/Ginsburg” is the troupe’s first foray into opera.

“I’ve always really loved opera, and really some of the best theatrical productions I’ve ever seen have been operas,” said director Knight, 44, of Iowa City. “I also really love plays about people I think I know about, but I want to know more about.”

Scalia and Ginsburg fit that bill. So during the pandemic, when Knight’s wife, mezzo soprano Mary Jane Knight, told him about this show, he jumped right in.

“I instantly Googled it, and it just suddenly seemed like something that would really resonate here,” he said.

When he floated the idea to a board member who also is a lawyer, and then to the theater’s managing director, he said their eyes “lit up.” He took that as a good sign.

It’s also the right time to stage this show.

Following Election Day, “51 percent of the country is going to have to somehow agree to live with the other 49 percent of the country,” Knight said. “There are deep divides that so many people feel passionate about — and should.

“These two people felt incredibly passionate about what they thought, and yet they somehow had a core that transcended that — that believed in the institution that made both of them succeed, and that belief in ‘What is the center of the wheel of which we all exist on?’ That thing is what they somehow tapped into, and what this opera is giving us the opportunity to open ourselves up towards.”

That’s where this musical art form comes into play.

“Opera as an institution is one of the few places where conservatives and liberals find common ground,” Sakir said. “So hopefully, people from different ideologies can come to the show and enjoy it in a similar way, and maybe have some conversation about it.”

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Common threads

Joining mezzo Mary Jane Knight onstage are tenor Foo Chen Gui as Scalia and bass/baritone Phillip Lopez as The Commentator — the character who serves a bit like an agitator, stirring up the action.

When it was time to cast the show, vocalist Knight, 40, who operates Knightingale Voice Studio in Iowa City, knew of Gui, and suggested him for the Scalia role. A native of Malaysia, Gui, 33, is studying music at the University of Iowa. English is his third language, but you’d never guess that.

“You showed up on the first day of rehearsal so well prepared, spitting out this English text as if it was your first language, truly,” Sakir said to Gui.

More common threads weave throughout the cast and directors’ paths.

Mary Jane Knight worked with Sakir at Opera Memphis, where he was serving as the music director. Since 2020, Sakir, 40, who lives in Philadelphia, has been the artistic director of Opera Montana in Bozeman. He connected with Adam Knight last summer, when Sakir and his family were passing through Iowa City.

That was the catalyst in making the opera come to fruition for Riverside Theatre, Adam Knight said. He mentioned to Sakir that he had been thinking about programming the opera, and when Sakir’s eyes lit up, “that made me realize that we might actually have all the pieces in place to pull this off.”

Sakir had crossed paths with Lopez, 30, of Avon, Ill., who performed this summer as an apprentice artist with Des Moines Metro Opera, so he is rounding out the “Scalia/Ginsburg” cast. The production agreement required Wang to sign off on the cast, via submitted resumes and videos. He approved.

All are enjoying this opportunity to work and grow together.

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“Foo (Gui) is a delightful man,” vocalist Knight said, “and he has a big heart. I think that’s personally what I glom on to.”

With Gui, she’s enjoying exploring the lead characters’ relationship.

“What you don’t really see very much in the media, is their friendship,” she said. “And that’s really the essence of where (the play) starts and where it ends — and in the middle, we have our little tussle over politics. But it’s the essence of what we all need to do, which is see the soul in the other, and find that common ground.”

Vocally, the show is full of challenges for her, as the vocal range goes higher and lower than the typical mezzo range.

“But it’s been really, really fun,” she said, adding that she gets to use a little bit of jazz and gospel. “I also love singing in different styles … so it’s really fun to anchor myself in opera, but then say, ‘Oh yeah, I can belt out a B in the middle of an opera aria.’ ”

Lopez has a juicy role as The Commentator, describing him as “kind of like a third party that comes into the show and basically wants to test the moral character of both of these Supreme Court justices.”

“I think that the idea starts off with trying to understand why Scalia dissented so much in his presidings over certain Supreme Court cases,” Lopez said, “and then Ginsburg kind of implicates herself in the issue. And then it becomes a story about how they can reconcile their overall differences of political opinion into a single, unified opinion that the Supreme Court really should have. So The Commentator is a moral judge of all that kind of action.”

New territory

The entire process has been a learning curve that Adam Knight has embraced.

“This is my first time working directly on an opera,” he said, admitting that he isn’t a musician and doesn’t read music. “It’s my first time directing an opera, and it’s been wonderful to watch the precision and clarity with which Michael (Sakir) works with the singers.

“This is a piece that has a lot of little twists and turns, and then you try to respect and honor, and then push forward with that clarity in our staging. But also recognizing that we have a story to tell, and sometimes that story is very clear, and sometimes it takes experimentation, like any newer piece of work does.

“Unlike a play, there’s very little stage directions, and so it’s almost as if I was handed a script that had never been produced before, and then figuring out our way through it and what it visually needed to be.

“It’s been really quite thrilling,” he said, “and all while recognizing that these three artists who are on their feet and singing are doing incredibly difficult artistic things.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com