Could A Wedding play on Broadway? Leaving aside the very real issues of whether it could get financing and if it might have to be double or triple cast to manage eight performances a week, I would say yes, it certainly could. Maybe not for a very long run, and it wouldn't pull in the tourists who keep the likes of Phantom and Mamma Mia! running now and forever, but it could find favor among the audiences who are looking for musical theater that offers, well, good music and good theater.
For this world premiere commissioned by Lyric Opera, composer William Bolcom (who composed the opera McTeague, also directed by Altman at Lyric in 1992) uses contemporary song styles for a number of the arias, but his score is primarily classical. It's a rich and intriguing score, perhaps far from catchy in a show tune sense, but still enjoyable and rewarding on a first listening and not much of a stretch for a listener with an ear for the music of, say, Adam Guettel. It's certainly an opera, though. There's little dialogue and much recitative that seems written to showcase the singers' voices. There are many vocal jumps of an octave or more and lots of loud, high and long notes. If I may add my own criterion for whether a piece is an opera or musical, I'll say that if the piece has numbers that might be sung in cabaret, it's a musical.
Opera has traditionally been viewed as being much more about the music than the drama, a sort of concert in costume if you will. While this production boasts a stellar performance from opera stars including baritones Mark Delavan and Timothy Nolen (both of whom played Sweeney Todd at the New York City Opera last spring) as well as tenor Jerry Hadley, it delivers equally as a theater experience. A satirical exploration of the secrets, lies and illusions of the two families involved in the wedding, it has an edge and a wit one does not normally associate with classical opera, but opera seems a perfect medium in which to bring Altman's characters to the stage. Their emotions are so intense and illusions so great that the larger-than-life, presentational performance style of the art form is entirely appropriate. It puts the characters in another world, which is precisely where they are ... a bit divorced from reality. The conventions of opera distance us from the characters and signal that it's okay to laugh at them.
The story concerns the wedding of Dino Corelli (Patrick Miller) and Margaret "Muffin" Brenner (Anna Christy). He's the son of Italian immigrant Luigi Corelli (Hadley) who married into the old money Sloan family of Lake Forest, Illinois under a mysterious agreement with family matriarch Nettie (Kathryn Harries). Nettie dies shortly into the first act, though most of the characters are unaware of her demise until later in the opera. Muffin is the daughter of the very nouveau riche Louisville trucking magnet "Snooks" Brenner (Delavan) and his wife "Tulip" (Lauren Flanigan). In the first act, we see that Dino met Muffin while attending a military school, the only school that would accept him; and that he may have impregnated Muffin's sister Buffy (Lauren Carter). Luigi's wife Victoria (Catherine Malfitano) missed the ceremony due to her addiction to morphine. She's enabled in that addiction by her brother-in-law Jules (Jake Gardner). He's an ex-physician who becomes attracted to Tulip and succeeds in arousing her urges and emotions. Victoria's sister Diana (Patricia Risley) is having a secret affair with the Sloan's Caribbean butler Randolph (Mark S. Doss). Nettie's sister Bea arrives in act two and romances the guest (Nolen), a paid professional guest and the only one of the 200 invited to show up. Dino's best man, Breedley (Brian Leerhuber), arrives after having missed the ceremony while spending a drunken night in jail. His efforts to break up the newly wedded couple seem motivated by more than the desire to join the military together with Dino, as we see when Breedley attempts to sober up a drunken Dino in a steamy shower. Hovering over them all is the wedding planner Rita Billingsley (Maria Kanyova), whose attention to detail and to the female guests gets a bit overpowering for some of the wedding party.