Arts & Ideas: The My Friend’s Story Review

My Friend’s Story

Presented by the International Festival of Arts & Ideas “in collaboration with the Yale School of Music and the Yale Office of the Provost, with the support of the Yale School of Drama.” 8 p.m. June 19 & 20 at Yale’s Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel Street, New Haven. www.artidea.org

Music by Martin Bresnick. Libretto by J.D. McClatchy. Directed by David Chambers. Conducted by Julian Pellicano. Prodcued by Lileana Blain-Cruz. Performed by Jonathan Hays (Narrator), Abigail Nims (Milena), Ryan Allen (Jacob) and Claire Coolen (Hannah).

For a modern-music, modern-dress, scaled-down new work by a maverick multi-styled composer and a pithy American poet, given a robust and theatrical staging, My Friend’s Story is startlingly and wonderfully old-school. Clear and accessible and lovely, gentle yet powerful, with a suspense romantic plotline that’s both realistic and lush, My Friend’s Story reminds you what opera is good for.

Composer Martin Bresnick, librettist J.D. McClatchy and director David Chambers (all of whom happen to be longtime faculty members at Yale) aren’t slavishly following the accepted rules of the opera art form here. If you’ve followed their respective careers you know this is not in their nature. But by following their own astute artistic instincts, and bringing in personal passions such as lyrical narrative devices, Russian theater practices and jazz music, they’ve constructed a surehanded, confident and rousing romantic drama.

When these intense yet credibly real-world characters burst into song, they have important things to convey. They tell stories, they share secrets, they express worry about strange intruders who enter the story.

Bresnick’s sweetly shifting score has moments of pure songcraft, jazz interludes (with sax and bass solos), dramatic build-ups and a drawn-out tension. The singers don’t sell themselves short on their arias, or on some extraordinary duets and trios, but they also know how to act, and to underplay scenes so they convey realism and not melodrama. This is a chamber opera that’s actually set mostly in a chamber—a parlor, to be precise. It’s staged intimately. The musicians are situated behind a backdrop of mismatched windows. That metaphorical windows-of-the-soul, with music wafting from beyond, is ideal for such an ethereal drama.

This is a touching, in-the-moment, classy and credible new musical theater piece about real characters with real emotions that are best expressed through transcendent classical singing. My Friend’s Story works so well because it respects tradition yet exists in the present-day world of naturalism, shorter attention spans and new musical expressions.

This confident work not only serves its source material, a story by the genius writer Chekhov, it also is well suited to the aims of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. The festival has long supported new classical works, especially those with theatrical trappings and strong narrative elements. Opening night of My Friend’s Story, which is technically a “preview” run as the work undergoes further development, was sold out. There were sincere ovations and gasps of admiration heard throughout the performance, and the sort of curtain-call reception which any theater creator would hope for. You felt part of something special just by showing up. Among friends, you could say.