Michael Kelly in the title role of Opera Parallèle’s Harvey Milk Reimagined/Matt Simpkins

Opera Parallèle (OP), a prominent San Francisco-based contemporary opera company, doesn’t wait that long to seek the joys of socially conscious operas that resonate with audiences. Its upcoming production of Harvey Milk Reimagined, which opens next week as the centerpiece of OP’s 15^th Anniversary Season, is a case in point.

Originally called Ensemble Parallèle, OP was founded by Artistic Director Nicole Paiement in 2010 and is currently managed by Paiement and Creative Director Brian Staufenbiel. Aiming to “merge tradition with innovation to re-invent opera for our modern world, ” OP has championed and/or premiered an impressive list of contemporary operas in the last fifteen years, each with a brand-new production directed by Staufenbiel. Being nomadic, OP has performed all those pieces in collaboration with various arts organizations in San Francisco which led critic Joshua Kosman called OP “one of the area’s most reliably fine homes for contemporary opera.”

The upcoming show is the West Coast premiere of the new version of Stewart Wallace and Michael Korie’s Harvey Milk, a co-commission with Opera Theatre of St. Louis and presented in partnership with Yerba Buena Center of the Arts. In a way, the opera, which chronicles the life and death of San Francisco’s eminent politician and LGBTQ activist Harvey Milk, is returning home to the city where Milk lived, became the first openly gay man elected to public office in California (as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors), and was assassinated along with Mayor George Moscone by fellow Supervisor Dan White on November 27, 1978. The presentation of Harvey Milk Reimagined, which opens at the end of the month, is timelier than ever, as it coincides with what would have been Milk’s 95th birthday and also marks the start of San Francisco Pride Month celebrations during a time when many LGBTQ rights are under fire.

Harvey Milk Reimagined highlights one of OP’s strengths, namely creating (or commissioning) reorchestrations of critical contemporary works. Reorchestrations have been a part of OP’s DNA since its inception; its inaugural season (as Ensemble Parallèle) featured the West Coast premiere of John Rea’s chamber reorchestration of Alban Berg’s seminal Wozzeck.

In a conversation with Paiement and Staufenbiel last month, Paiement said, “the company has a tradition of looking at larger works produced in large spaces that we feel are masterworks and often commissioning or doing our own reorchestrations — with or without the composer — so that we give them a new life and that they can be performed by smaller companies, in smaller venues, or less costly.” She also added that the company has developed a reputation for giving composers, especially when they are still alive, the opportunity to revisit their piece or to find a different angle through which to tell the story.

Harvey Milk was the brainchild of David Gockley, the previous General Director of San Francisco Opera (SFO) and Houston Grand Opera, who approached Wallace and Korie with the idea. A co-commission shared among Houston Grand Opera, New York City Opera, and SFO, the work premiered in Houston on January 21, 1995, in a production by Christopher Alden, with Ward Holmquist conducting and starring Robert Orth in the title role. After a somewhat problematic New York premiere later that year (which the creators considered a debacle), the work underwent significant revision in collaboration with Donald Runnicles, SFO’s then-Music Director, and the new version premiered triumphantly at the Orpheum Theatre on 9 November 1996 conducted by Runnicles and featuring the same cast as in Houston. Runnicles also recorded the opera for Teldec.

Harvey Milk is a sprawling monster of an opera. Cast in three Acts (each with its own heading, “The Closet”, “The Castro”, and “City Hall,” to denote three distinct phases of Milk’s life), the opera calls for ten principal roles and over 70 minor singing roles. (The principal cast members, other than the title role, double many of those roles.) The work also requires an orchestra of 80 to 85 members, and runs for three hours. As a result, performances have been few and far between since the SFO shows.

Harvey Milk Reimagined was born from a desire to see the piece from a completely different angle. Once again, it was Gockley who connected Wallace and Korie to OP for this overhaul, and the piano/vocal score of Harvey Milk Reimagined even bears the dedication, “For David Gockley, who started it and helped bring it back to life.” Wallace elaborated his reasoning in an interview with Zachary Woolfe, saying that he “literally started on an empty page from bar one. So there’s not a single bar that’s the same, even though it’s definitely the same opera.”

The reimagined version now unfolds in only two Acts with an emphasis on its mythic elements as a celebration of Milk’s life and has a running time of just an hour and 50 minutes. Many of the minor characters were eliminated and the score is now scalable to 31 – 66 orchestra players, enabling the piece to be done by companies both small and large. But most importantly, Wallace added, “[t]he music is freer now, and more organic, and yet completely recognizable as what we wrote.”

OP began working on Harvey Milk Reimagined with Stewart and Korie in 2017. “It was a very long project,” Paiement shared. “We first worked on the libretto, Brian mostly, with Michael and Stewart, but then I worked a great deal on the score with Stewart. It was a very powerful score — it had a lot of brass and rhythm, and we didn’t want to lose that. It’s a tuning of the orchestration, it’s not a reduction.”

Nicole Paiement and Brian Staufenbiel/Scott Wall

Staufenbiel sees it as “a distillation of the arc of his life. His realization — growing up hearing about the persecution of the Jews and finding his sexuality — and making the equation between the two. And giving his life, literally, for this cause.”

The new score, according to Paiement and Staufenbiel, is particularly effective for the pivotal moment in the opera, Milk’s assassination. The tighter new orchestration goes beyond the aggression of the act of shooting on stage to remind, they hope, the audience of what it represents: “he was murdered because he was such a powerful political figure in a movement that so many people were against at that time, and frankly, are against right now,” said Staufenbiel.

OP originally planned to premiere Harvey Milk Reimagined in May 2020 to mark the 90^th anniversary of Milk’s birth before the San Francisco COVID-19 shelter-in-place mandate, exactly two months prior, shattered that plan. Harvey Milk Reimagined eventually received its premiere at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis on 11 June 2022, in a production by James Robinson and Seán Curran and conducted by Carolyn Kuan (with an orchestra of 66). The cast for OP’s Harvey Milk Reimagined will instead feature a production by Staufenbiel starring baritone Michael Kelly in his company debut in the title role under Paiement who will lead an orchestra of 31.

In conversation, Staufenbiel offered a few pointers about the details of his staging. The piece is challenging as it involves a variety of locations, big and small, from The Metropolitan Opera in New York City to the streets of San Francisco, and then into the bedroom.

Set rendering for Harvey Milk Reimagined/Courtesy of Opera Parallèle

“We are using these beautiful flying sculptures (designed by Jacquelyn Scott) that are made out of doors, as things are in the closet and then out, as surfaces both for projections and lighting while we are telling the story. Large rolling stair units create City Hall and the steps of City Hall and, when they are put together, the beautiful Twin Peaks of San Francisco.” The structures will be dynamic and transform onstage at different times throughout. At the same time, projections (by David Murakami) will use archival VHS footage and video static noise will be used anytime there is violence or tension to create an analog effect appropriate for the era.

OP hopes that Harvey Milk Reimagined will ignite conversations among audience members, encourage them to reflect on what they’ve seen, and help make changes in the community by offering events as part of its Bullhorn community outreach programs. They will be collaborating with TV station KQED (a first for OP) on “Harvey Milk’s Legacy: A Night of Reflection and Song” happening on May 21, and with the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco (JCCSF) on “Opera & Activism: The Legacy of Harvey Milk” featuring esteemed dramaturg Kip Cranna, who also helped in the creation process of Harvey Milk Reimagined, on June 3. On May 22, the whole cast will be taking a break from rehearsal to participate in “Harvey Milk Day: A Protest of Joy” at Jane Warner Plaza, followed by a joyous march to the Roxie Theater for the 40th Anniversary Screening of Rob Epstein’s groundbreaking 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. In another first, OP will also offer an audio-described performance for visually impaired audience members on 7 June.

Kosman once called Harvey Milk “an opera for our time,” and that essentially still holds true, even almost thirty years later. “This story is meant to be told all the time,” Paiement said, “because it’s about believing and having resilience and being authentic to what you believe in life and sacrificing yourself for it.”

But Staufenbiel quickly added, “[t]his is not a reaction. We are not doing this because of what is happening politically in this country. We already planned on it five years ago. Milk truly created a Rainbow Coalition, which I think we should be working towards right now, bringing back the same concept of all of us coming together and negotiating how to live together.” Nevertheless, OP’s work still butts up against the current political moment; on May 2, the National Endowment for the Arts rescinded previously awarded grants to at least 28 San Francisco arts nonprofit organizations, including for Harvey Milk Reimagined.

It’s been almost 30 years since the SFO premiere, and 17 years since Gus Van Sant’s outstanding Milk, starring Sean Penn, graced the screen. OP hopes Harvey Milk Reimagined will bring a completely new audience, particularly a new generation of young people and especially young queer people who aren’t familiar with Harvey like the older generation was. “Harvey Milk,” Paiement affirms, “needs to be remembered.”

But Milk’s memory is alive and well through OP’s regular programming, too. Programs like Bullhorn, which includes a Happy Hour Open Rehearsal for this production, and Expansive—OP’s annual showcase of transgender and non-binary classical artists—are inspired by Milk, who used his platform to bring communities together. Furthermore, Paiement credited OP’s success to its location in San Francisco, with its great sense of accepting communities, in addition to the fantastic team of artists OP has worked with over the years and a very dedicated Board. “The city loves community,” she said. “We had an idea that we didn’t realize was so original because we honestly love contemporary opera and resonating stories, and we love to collaborate with diverse composers.”

“When we started, people were very enthusiastic, but it was a smaller audience. Now we have a bigger audience base. They don’t come to everything, but we do have an audience,” Paiement adds, noting that contemporary operas have simultaneously become more of a norm. OP nevertheless limits their scope to chamber and contemporary operas, complementing the work of the larger San Francisco Opera with a “complete, not compete” mentality.

Members of the cast and creative team of Opera Parallèle’s Harvey Milk Reimagined

Both Paiement and Staufenbiel are also grateful that their shows also engage with the “non-opera people,” those interested in contemporary art, theater, or dance. But the needs of the community remain a priority; whether traditional opera or contemporary arts lovers, gay or straight, young or old, “we have to create a program that will say, ‘we care for you to come.’” She even cheekily added, “If you want a diverse audience, then live up to what you want, and go and do it!”

Harvey Milk Reimagined foreshadows future growth for OP. While it is the very first OP show to have two weekends of performances instead of just one, the company is also considering expanding their footprint beyond San Francisco through tours and co-productions.

Next year, OP will score another first, a collaboration with the esteemed UC Berkeley’s Cal Performances to present La Belle et la Bête, an original presentation of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast that merges Jean Cocteau’s classic 1946 romantic fantasy with Philip Glass’s mesmerizing 1994 score. OP mounted this production in 2022 to great acclaim, and it is exciting to see their bringing it to greater audiences.

If you are in San Francisco for Pride Month, do yourself a favor and catch Harvey Milk Reimagined at Blue Shield of California Theater at YBCA and get acquainted with the hero who changed the course of history! In the words of Paiement, “Harvey Milk needs to be remembered!”