Performing Arts

It's a daring gesture in a churchgoing city that still proudly calls itself Cowtown. But Fort Worth Opera is opening its second annual festival with an operatic version of Tony Kushner's theatrical extravaganza Angels in America.

That's right: the play about AIDS in Reagan's America, ranging from homophobic self-hatred to redemptive love. And the music is by one of Europe's more avant-garde composers, the Hungarian Peter Eötvös. But the opera lasts only about an hour and 40 minutes, compared with seven hours for the complete two-part play.

The festival, which opens Friday, also includes those operatic favorites Turandot and Lucia di Lammermoor, plus American composer Carlisle Floyd's Of Mice and Men.

Ellen Appel

The Fort Worth performance of Angels in America , featuring Ava Pine, will be the opera's second in the U.S.

Also part of the three-week festivities will be a vocal recital by mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, presented in association with the Marilyn Horne Foundation. And the two rounds of Fort Worth Opera's biennial McCammon Voice Competition will again provide a showcase for up-and-coming young singers.

In conjunction with the festival, Dallas' Voices of Change will present a staging of Ricky Ian Gordon's song cycle Orpheus and Euridice, with soprano Gina Browning, clarinetist Jonathan Jones and pianist Joe Illick.

There will be a benefit performance by the Guanhua Acrobats from Shanghai. The acrobats, who will also appear in Turandot, came to Dallas recently expecting a national tour, but found themselves stranded with no tour, money, food or shelter.

"Both the Turandot and Lucia sets and costumes are extremely traditional, very beautiful, really grand opera," says Darren K. Woods, Fort Worth Opera's ebullient general director.

"We hadn't done Turandot in a long time. It was one of the few Puccinis we hadn't gotten around to, and we found a great tenor [Dongwon Shin] and soprano [Elizabeth Bennett].

Ellen Appel

Elizabeth Futral in Lucia di Lammermoor

"The other two operas were driven by the artists who wanted to do them," Mr. Woods says. "When Stephen Costello wanted to do Lucia, his management also offered Elizabeth Futral, and the rest of the cast just sort of fit together."

Of Mice and Men was added when the company managed to land tenor Anthony Dean Griffey, who virtually owns the role of Lennie Small. Composed in 1970, Mr. Floyd's opera is based on the Depression-era John Steinbeck novel. Very much in the American populist-opera tradition, the music is warmly tonal.

Set in the hardscrabble world of itinerant farmworkers, the opera centers on two characters: Lennie, physically powerful but, in today's expression, developmentally challenged; and his virtual "big brother," George Milton.

Fort Worth Opera inaugurated its spring-into- summer festival last year, as an alternative to spreading its productions through the main season.

With sets, staging and orchestra to be physically coordinated, opera productions require a good deal of rehearsal time in the halls where they will be performed. During the September-to-May season, that kind of time is scarce in Bass Performance Hall, which is also home to the Fort Worth Symphony, Texas Ballet Theater, Cliburn Concerts and the hall's own series. And Fort Worth Opera kept having to book productions in conflict with the Dallas Opera.

Apart from the quadrennial Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, the May-into-June time period is relatively "down" time at Bass Hall. The smaller-scale Angels in America, which opens the festival Friday, is being performed in the 450-seat Scott Theatre, in Fort Worth's Cultural District.

The festival format allows running different operas on succeeding days and nights. So out-of-town opera lovers can get great bang for their bucks, with the chance to see as many as four operas in as many days.

Plan your life

Tony Kushner will be interviewed in the Dallas Museum of Art's Arts & Letters Live series at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Dallas Theater Center, 3636 Turtle Creek Blvd. $22 to $37. 214-922-1818, www.dallasmuseumofart.org/ALL.