Dead Man Walking • Program Note
It was June of 1997 when Terrence McNally first suggested Dead Man Walking as the subject of our first opera. I can still sense the electric shiver I felt when he said the words. It was a shiver of intense recognition that opera would be exactly the right art form to bring this story to the stage. The emotional language is immense, so it makes sense for the characters to sing, and the drama could fill a large opera house. It is American, yet universal. It is of our time, yet timeless. It is an intimate story with large forces at work, the stakes high at every turn, and thanks to the great film by Tim Robbins (starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn) it has the feeling of being part of the American DNA. It also felt like exactly the right story for me as a composer. With the blessing and enthusiastic support of the amazing Sister Helen Prejean, we set to work. She gave us permission to explore and tell her story as we saw fit, knowing it would need to be adapted and changed for the stage. Her single request was that it remain a story of redemption.
It was a first opera for me and Terrence, and a highly controversial project during a time when the premiere of a new American opera was a rare occasion: there might be three in a season. Now there are dozens each year. San Francisco Opera General Director Lotfi Mansouri made sure we had everything we needed to produce the work at the highest level possible. The cast included Susan Graham as Sister Helen, John Packard as Joseph DeRocher, and Frederica von Stade as his mother. The conductor was Patrick Summers, the director was Joe Mantello with sets by Michael Yeargan. Opening night was October 7, 2000. It went well. Very well. The run was sold out and two additional performances were added. Reviews were all over the place, but nobody was ambivalent; everyone had a strong opinion. The opera did what we had hoped: it moved and surprised people, and brought them into a dialogue about something they had perhaps only considered in the abstract.
Immediately following that first production, six opera companies joined forces to create a new production from director Leonard Foglia and designed Michael McGarty. It was designed to be flexible so that it could fit on many stages in various opera houses and it traveled widely starting in 2002. It is in this production that the great mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato made her New York opera stage debut, and it is this production that she will sing the challenging role of Sister Helen Prejean at the Teatro Real.
By now, the opera has traveled around the globe with more than 300 performances on five continents, including major productions in New York, Houston, Sydney, Adelaide, Dresden, Vienna, Calgary, Montreal, Vancouver, Cape Town, Dublin and Copenhagen, to name a few. It has also been embraced by universities and conservatories. Early in 2017, Dead Man Walking received its 50th international production at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. Later in 2018, it received its 60th international production. Soon it will be produced in a new production by the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The journey continues and the dialogue intensifies as the difficult central question of the story is posed again, as it has been throughout the history of mankind: are we for vengeance or forgiveness?