Berkeley Opera's "Ballad of Baby Doe" a silver mine of Americana; Through Sunday, July 19

Jillian Khuner/Torlef Borsting/Berkeley Opera/The Ballad of Baby Doe/Photo: Ching Chang

Jillian Khuner's Baby Doe wears white to wed Torlef Borsting's silver baron Horace Tabor

Berkeley Opera’s production of The Ballad of Baby Doe seemed to epitomize Berkeleydom. It's Berkeleyesque perfection with it’s simplicity, humor, humanity and songs so lyrical and heartfelt. A silvermine of Americana. I just cannot say enough good things about this production, but let’s start with Baby Doe, Jillian Khuner. Jillian Khuner broke my heart with her song about walking beside her love forever. Her character and the real Baby Doe froze to death alone in a miner’s shack 35 years after her beloved’s death and the scene brought a tear to my eye. I had to wipe my tear away with the sleeve of my sweater as I had not brought any tissue, not expecting the moment to be so touching. Jillian’s pretty and clear voice especially when she hit those high notes just made her seem so earnest and vulnerable, singing right from her heart. Moreover the setting of the Julia Morgan Theater suited this simple and authentic American production, with it’s real, dark wooden and intimate architecture.

Jeremy Knight's staging

I also loved the staging which had the chorus of the mining community seated on stage at either side like a jury of peers throughout the production, going from dance hall patrons to wedding guests. The men of the chorus, in their plaid shirts and jeans and beards, looked a lot like the Berkeley audience itself. Like the new Levi’s poster says in San Francisco, this country was not built by men in suits.

Below, George Arana as a drunk miner destined to sell the Matchless Mine to Tabor. One of Arana's many incantations in this production, from priest to opera house stage doorman.

The Ballad of Baby Doe/Berkeley Opera/George Arana/Photo: Ching Chang

About the projections and sets of Jeremy Knight. His projection of the dance hall view of the street from inside, the Clarendon Hotel, Horace Tabor’s office, the elegant wedding in Washington DC with the towering cake and candles; the Tabor Opera House . . . worked wonderfully especially when projected onto an old fashioned oval screen. I’ve seen Andrew Lloyd Weber use projection in his old fashioned musical melodrama in the West End of London. In The Woman in White, a screen front and center stage will have an exeterior projected such as a brick wall of a building with two characters and the audience eavesdropping from the ledge. The screen peels away to reveal the interior of the room, the real stage and another layer of the story.

Jillian Khuner, Bubbles, Marilyn Monroe?

Similarly, Jillian Khuner, married to the maestro Jonathan Khuner, could not have done it alone. So the cast just brought out the best in each other. The chemistry seemed charming and ingratiating between Jillian’s sweet and innocent and lonely MidWestern young woman and the burly, bearded and raven haired silver baron Horace Tabor, played by Torlef Borsting. What a wonderful rich and warm voice to match the persona.

That these two lonely souls looking for appreciation, love and a little tenderness in a rugged world found each other just seemed so natural. The way they gravitated to each other so simple. They meet after Jillian as Baby Doe sings the Willow song. It’s about being away from her beloved and yearning for the feeling they had when they first met under the willow. Beverly Sills in her autobiography Bubbles says she used to sing it with innocence like that of Marilyn Monroe, a woman aware of her simple charms but never calculating or evil. Jillian sings it plainer and more MidWestern but just as convincingly. Marilyn did indeed come from the little farming town of Castroville, the artichoke capital near Salinas.

Lisa Houston as Puritanical wife Augusta (like the city in Georgia): Tea time for Horace and Baby?

Did Marilyn ever have to take on the proper married women of her town? Lisa Houston, actually a pretty young woman as pictured in the program, looked alarmingly like the real Augusta Tabor, a force to be reckoned with.

Lisa Houston/Augusta Tabor/The Ballad of Baby Doe/Berkeley Opera/Photo: Ching Chang

The Ballad of Baby Doe/Berkeley Opera/August Tabor/Lisa Houston/Photo: Ching Chang

When her Augusta Tabor goes Valkyrie at the urging of the other miner’s wives to protect the virtue of married women, she hits these climatic high notes shrill and loud and domineering enough to shatter the tea cup in her cold and bony hands. Pictured above left to right, soprano Elizabeth Gentner (Emily), mezzo Cary Ann Rosko (Effie), soprano Angela Hayes (Mary), soprano Elizabeth Wells (Sarah).

Wife Number One takes the gloves off: The love note from hubby Horace

The scene where she reads a love note from Horace only to find out in the last line it’s meant for Baby Doe, it’s searing and filled me with a sense of anticipation as she gets to the final line: Baby Doe. Yet Lisa is able to show Augusta did have a soul and a heart. In the scene set in Pasadena, California, where Augusta lives alone and ill, she shows inner turmoil at needing to rescue her former husband yet heeds his demand to leave him in peace. It’s done with some Victorian restraint and not overplayed for comedic effect or melodrama, letting the emotions come from the writing.

Similarly Baby’s alone at the Clarendon Hotel singing the Dearest Mama song. Baby’s checking out as she plans to end the affair. She hears the Puritan or Victorian East Coast wife belittle Horace and decides to stay with him and love him after all. Her idolization of him or sense of romantic love shines in the Silver song she sings for him diplomatically at their extravagant wedding in Washington DC. IMHO, Jillian’s phrasing and intonation make it seem beautiful rather than corny, politically motivated or commercial. The song romantizes silver as she identified the precious metal with her husband and their marriage.

What really happened

The confrontation there with Augusta Tabor never happened, it’s created to convey real information though. Neither did the poker game scene with Horace and his cronies. Similarly the climatic scene where Horace dies in his opera house after punishing himself with visions of Augusta and her judgment never happened. (The Ballad of Baby Doe by Duane A. Smith.) He never told Baby Doe to keep the Matchless Mine forever. The mine did seem to be an appropriate symbol of their love, silver being precious and running deep. However their love outlasted the mine’s productivity as the world changed to the gold standard. Perhaps their problem was sentimentalizing which interfered with cold hard business judgment like that of the boss’s daughter Augusta.

Yet how could Tabor start over when he bought the town of Leadville and had a wife and two children? He couldn’t leave it all at his age and start over in the gold country of California. Miners even in Colorado were in their twenties and thirties and transient.

Losing it all probably killed Horace Tabor in real life and in the opera, not just the poisoning after his appendix burst as happened to the real Horace Tabor in 1899.

John Bischoff sings the presidential candidate

Another hero in this story is William Jennings Bryan sung heroically by John Bischoff, young, tall and dashing. He hit the most wonderful low note singing of the depths in his stump speech on the campaign trail in Leadville.

John Bischoff/Ballad of Baby Doe/Berkeley Opera/Photo: Ching Chang

Notably, he sang

Get rid of the moneylenders and get back to the covenant between the people and God.

Cass and Kelcey, Carter and Kent

Horace Tabor died heavily mortgaged and in debt. The banks took almost everything he ever had. Later his youngest daughter Rosemary or “Silver Dollar” turns out to be a prostitute in the opera and in real life. Pretty Cass Mann sings the grown up vision Augusta makes Horace see on his deathbed. Silver Dollar is sung seductively and suggestively by Cass in a sexy red silk negligee. She gyrates her hips singing “faster, faster” referring the changing world.

Meanwhile. My original date Carter never saw this as he had a real funeral to go to after the sudden death of a pilot, a friend of his flying family. Instead my buddy Kent Coddington, a Christian, got an eyeful of the brazen hussy Silver Dollar and her drawers. Sorry Carter. Actually Cass even went to Colorado State University and has a master’s in music. Damn right she does.

Here's Kent playing the role of a journalist in a recent Bollywood film shot at the real capitol in Sacramento last month. He likes the story of The Ballad of Baby Doe and the love/hate relationship between Horace and Augusta.

Kent Coddington/My Name is Khan/Photo: Cindy Warner

Similarly mezzo Kelcey Jay Poe wore her garters well. She showed off her dance background, her dance-hall entertainer Meg dancing in the mayor’s dance hall with the man himself. Tabor just slips out of the opera nextdoor for a cigar he says to his wife when he’s caught in the act.

Kelcey also choreographed Berkeley Opera's Tales of Hoffman this year.

But back to business. The presidential candidate’s line about getting out from under moneylenders and back to the covenant between the people and God.

Justice and relief from self-defeating mortgages and student loans

It hit home for me as I know students, even high caliber Berkeley students, have no consumer rights as those all other consumers have. Senator Edward Kennedy and Attorney General Mario Cuomo have had to take action in the student loan scam just as President Obama has had to in the mortgage crisis. Students who default find themselves charged bogus fees and compounded interest in such high amounts they can never pay it; yet discharge in bankruptcy requires special adversary proceedings where the student must prove undue hardship. It goes against the spirit of bankruptcy, which is to give a fresh start.

Have ya'll read the Constitution?

Let's read the Constitution. I read it when I studied for the US Foreign Service exam to be a diplomat; and was one of 2,000 test takers that passed out of 18,000. Economic risk and development is the reason our forefathers gave us the freedoms citizens enjoy and are guaranteed to us in the Constitution. We must be free to fail and start over, to be given a chance. Unfortunately the loan industry has taken advantage and cripples so many otherwise promising lives.

So speaking of getting back to common decency and the spirit of the Constitution, Reverend Jesse Jackson has started working with Student Loan Justice. Jesse started his own campaign called ReduceTheRate.org. Another activist using Facebook got 130,000 members in a few months for his campaign and petition to Obama to get forgiveness of student loans as part of the economic stimulus package.

I have maintained my own news page with information meant to empower victims of the student loan scam. I list contact information for legislators and activists, means of determining current legislation and bills being proposed, class action attorneys, research and articles at StudentLoanJusticeCalifornia.

Photos: Ching Chang

Photo from Bollywood film: Cindy Warner

For more info: www.BerkeleyOpera.org

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