‘Streetcar’ maintains impact in wide-ranging operatic form

Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire” took the world by storm in 1947 and remains one of the greatest of 20th-century plays. That fact alone makes the operati version of it an important work.

From the beginning, people commented on the play’s operatic style — larger than life, emotionally complex, tragic — but it still took half a century before anyone gathered the courage to adapt it for opera.

On Friday, Hawaii Opera Theatre presented the Hawaii premiere. The opera, created by composer Andre Previn and librettist Philip Littell debuted less than 20 years ago, by the San Francisco Opera. The opportunity to hear a new opera in Hawaii lent extra excitement to the evening.

From play to opera, the story remains unchanged: Still fancying herself a Southern belle, Blanche DuBois has lost her family’s estate after the deaths of her relatives and has come to live with her sister and brother-in-law, Stella and Stanley Kowalski, in a small, lower-middle-class flat in New Orleans. The story revolves around the animosity and animal attraction between Blanche and Stanley, which erupts into violence and descends into insanity. Caught in the maelstrom are Harold “Mitch” Mitchell, one of Stanley’s friends who falls for Blanche, and Eunice Hubbell, the upstairs neighbor.

The libretto is true to the play — many lines are verbatim — but it is also not really an opera libretto. Because music needs time, either words must wait around and repeat while the music expands, or the music must quick-march to the drumming of the words. Adhering so closely to Williams’ words left little room for Previn’s music, and the result is more a play that has been set to music, with comparatively few arias.

Previn created a score that ranges widely from contemporary classical and jazz to film, onomatopoeia and word-painting (such as, for example, a descending chromatic line for “I am fading”). His most effective scenes were the little “eddies” where the words paused long enough for an aria’s reflection; perhaps best of all was Stella’s love-satiated, wordless humming, blissfully immune to Blanche’s verbal assault.

Conductor Mark Morash guided the orchestra skillfully through the complex score, keeping orchestra and singers in balance.

Jill Gardner delivered a powerful and finely nuanced performance as Blanche, the opera’s focal point. Her voice, healthier and more robust than Blanche’s character, is huge, richly hued, with clear enunciation and great control.

As Stanley, Ryan McKinny had the power to match her, with his powerful, warm baritone, and he was able to convey Stanley’s anguish and anger, desire, frustration, violence and vulnerability in that iconic spot-on scream for “Stella!”

Secondary leads were also strong: Stacey Tappan (Stella) had a lighter, clearer voice perfect for Blanche’s younger sister, and her aria longing for Stanley was both beautiful and touching. Victoria Livengood was terrific as Eunice, expanding the role with a great voice. Richard Cox, tall and well-cast, delivered a great Mitch, his voice big but sensitive, virile but vulnerable. And Charlie Mukaida was notable in his scene as the young man trying to collect for the newspaper while being seduced by Blanche.

HOT’s visual design was simple but effective, delivering meaning while keeping out of the way of the intense drama. The lighting was somewhat heavy-handed, with each color intense and conveying specific meaning: shadowy blues for fantasy, intense reds, rose-colored perceptions, sunny brights, harsh whites for reality, overhead spots for isolated introspection, etc.

There were clever solutions in staging, and even very challenging scenes worked well. Ghosts wandered through scenes, underscoring the drama unfolding in Blanche’s psyche, and staging echoed shifting relationships.

In the final scene, Blanche exits on a pianissimo, abandoned by everyone she knows and relying on “the kindness of strangers” (one of the play’s most famous lines), leaving reality for insanity/death to join her husband’s ghost.

Ruth O. Bingham received her doctorate in musicology from Cornell University and has been reviewing the musical arts for more than 25 years.