At last, Long Beach Opera’s production of Anthony Davis’s riveting, coruscating, poly-styled opera The Central Park Five has made it onto a recording. But why did it take so long?
The recording session for the opera was scheduled for June 25–26, 2022, at Silent Zoo Studios in Glendale, just a week after the company’s second production of the opera in North Long Beach’s Jordan High School auditorium. Unlike LBO’s world premiere full production in San Pedro in 2019, the revisit was a semi-staged concert performance that also served as a tuneup for the recording session. A release in an unspecified format was announced for early fall of 2022, but it took more than four years after the sessions to reach the public, finally arriving Aug. 28 on Platoon, digital-only.
Granted, it turned out to be timelier to put the recording out now than it would have been in 2022. Donald J. Trump, who is wickedly portrayed in the opera as a villainous, race-baiting, mob-rousing buffoon calling for the death penalty for the Five, was on the sidelines in 2022 — out of power, facing congressional hearings and investigations, and thus not so dangerous. But in the interim, Trump was returned to the White House, making The Central Park Five ever more relevant, especially since Araiza’s staging left Trump glowering over the stage from a fire escape, predicting that we hadn’t seen the last of him, nor of racial profiling.
In audio-only form, Davis’s score makes its most winning case during the jazz portions, mostly positioned in Act 1 and the closing scenes, with Duke Ellington and, to some extent, Charles Mingus as the core reference points. Indeed, an inside joke makes the Ellington influence specific when one of the Five imagines Harlem as a “black and tan fantasy,” thus namechecking two of Duke’s compositions in one thought. The jazz elements are deftly integrated into the generally atonal classical structure, a third-stream amalgam of which Davis is a master, and conductor Anthony Parnther makes them swing. As in most contemporary operas, the vocal lines are entirely recitative, with no easily discernible tunes.
Streaming doesn’t make it easy for those who are new to the work. No program notes, no libretto. Cast members are listed, but not the characters they play. We’re supposed to guess! I’ll save you the trouble: Cedric Berry is Yusef Salaam, William Powell III is Antron McCray, Bernard Holcomb is Kevin Richardson, Orson Van Gay II is Raymond Santana, and Ashley Faatoalia is Korey Wise — the five boys, now known as the Exonerated Five. Lacey Jo Benter is the District Attorney, Justin Ryan takes the composite role of the Masque, and Todd Strange inhabits the appropriately high-pitched hysterics of Trump.
While The Central Park Five loses some of its juice and outrage without the visuals, enough remains so that the score repays repeated listening. The sequence depicting the assault in Central Park is actually more frightening when stripped of the visuals. The sounds of her screaming and gagging are proof that the theater of the mind can be even more powerful and suggestive than anything a stage director can summon forth. On the other hand, the theater of the mind cannot quite reconcile robust adult singing voices with the scared youths they are supposed to represent. The caveat is real. Go listen anyway.
