My Variety Review: Opera 'Intimate Apparel'

Photo by Julieta Cervantes

Passions were never in short supply in Lynn Nottage’s 2003 play“Intimate Apparel,” where loneliness, longing and hope hover in every scene. In the latest, long-in-the-making collaboration between Lincoln Center Theater and the Metropolitan Opera, those passions fly free, revealing the operatic heart of “Intimate Apparel” in a new opera adaptation of this story of a 35-year-old Black seamstress aching for love in 1905 New York.

The tight construction of the play, with its spare two-hander scenes and focus on the lives of ordinary and overlooked people, makes it a natural as a stripped-down chamber opera. It also suggests a future life among those musical companies looking for a small-scale, relatable work filled with emotional grandeur for specialized voices. Here in its Lincoln Center premiere, rich vocal talents fill Ricky Ian Gordon’s sung-through music not just with soaring notes but with heartfelt expression.

Leading them is the sensitive soul at the center of it all, a mesmerizing Kearstin Piper Brown as Esther, who has lived in a Lower Manhattan boarding house for the past 18 years toiling alone over her sewing machine, creating exquisite undergarments for women to wear in their boudoir. (These creations are beautifully realized by costumer Catherine Zuber.) Esther’s customers run the gamut from an unhappily married society woman, Mrs. Van Buren (Naomi Louisa O’Connell), to Mayme (Krysty Swann), a prostitute with dreams of her own.

Despite the warnings of her sympathetic landlady (Adrienne Danrich, a maternal presence without sentimentality), the illiterate Esther — with the writing help of Mrs. Van Buren and Mayme — begins a correspondence with George Armstrong (Justin Austin), a laborer working on the Panama Canal, which leads to their eventual meeting, marriage and agonizing conflict.

Nottage has stripped down her play to a tight libretto. There’s an elegant, poetic simplicity in its essential journey of the human heart as it navigates matters of race, gender, religion and class.

Overlaying it all is Gordon’s lush score, which remains true to its operatic scope — and is aided by super-titles which help when words are lost in the musical stratosphere. While far from a true compositional hybrid, the score still …|CONTINUED|