Scott Suchman

Washington National Opera ended its long spring hiatus on 2 May with a production of Mason Bates and Mark Campbell’s The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs in the Kennedy Center Opera House.

Since premiering at Santa Fe in 2017, Steve Jobs has enjoyed an unusually wide reception for a new opera, with stops in Seattle, Atlanta, and San Francisco among others. No doubt the long trail of interest in all things Jobs following his death in 2011, as well as the novelty of an opera on a contemporary life, has helped to keep a sense of buzz going for the show. Yet for all the contemporary subject matter, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobsis often a regrettably conventional piece of theater.

Mark Campbell’s libretto delivers an elaborate “scenes from a life” structure (a total of 19 tableaux in about 90 minutes) that works diligently to distill major plot points from across Jobs’s adult life. The prologue, a flashback to Jobs’s childhood where he is given a work table and solemnly encouraged to “take things apart,” begins to hint at the biopic tropes and canned dialogue that will prevail throughout the piece.

Scenes proceed to highlight Jobs as irascible workaholic, visionary felled by hubris, rockstar flirting with megalomania, good buddy lured away by ambition, etc.–themes that all make a certain logical sense but provide little in the way of surprise or tension. Some moments stand out, like the dramatization of Jobs at the 2007 announcement of the iPhone as a malign messianic figure, or the startling cruelty with which Jobs abandons his illegitimate daughter. But mostly the story beats and interactions between characters feel deeply predictable.

Which is not to say I was bored, at least for the first half or so. The show moves at a brisk pace and any one scenario doesn’t overstay its welcome as we see Jobs’s early alliance with Steve Wozniak, a youthful relationship, the meet-cute with his future wife at a lecture, and seminal moments influencing his thinking.

But things start to drag in the back half as the libretto and score builds a crisis point out of Jobs’s mid-80s excesses and battles with the Apple board. Jobs’s descent is depicted in an intense musical sequence that is impressive at first but ultimately seems one dimensional. The length and tumult of this psychological breakdown is the catalyst for Jobs’s redemption, as we then move into the show’s extended resolution about finding refuge in marriage and family. The final set piece is an overly long scene of Jobs’s ghost attending his own funeral that takes a turn for the maudlin as wife Laurene offers direct-to-audience bromides about his complicated legacy.

Composer Mason Bates is a familiar face around the Kennedy Center, who regularly unleashed his turntables on the concert hall back when he served as the Center’s composer-in-residence in the mid-2010s. Bates eschews the more aggressive electronica for a very specific sound world here, using unexpected instruments like electric guitar to create something that sounds modern and technology-adjacent yet still organic and complementary of the human voice (at least when those voices are amplified). There is some memorable vocal writing here, too, like the Jobs character’s central aria riffing on the similarities between computers and instruments, though the score is less successful at developing and deepening the two-hander scenes.

Scott Suchman

The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs is not a poorly made opera, but it is just so relentlessly mid, as the kids might say. Indeed, it leaves one mulling the limits of the operatic form, and whether such a straightforward retelling of key moments from Steve Jobs’s life wouldn’t be better served as a piece of straight theater or maybe a limited Netflix series where more nuanced characters and detail about the subject’s world could be brought to the fore. While there are glimpses here of what a more effective and adventurous operatic approach might look like, this is ultimately a very basic treatment of the material with little to further challenge and engage the audience.

The punishing title role was ably handled here by baritone John Moore, who has made Jobs something of a specialty over numerous productions in recent years. His steely sound nicely held the big set pieces together and revealed a degree of tenderness in more lyric passages. He also credibly met the considerable dramatic demands here, though despite 90 minutes of intense scrutiny, the Jobs character remains largely opaque at the end.

A strong supporting cast did much to enliven the other key parts. Wei Wu, a former WNO Cafritz Young Artist, brought his distinctive bass and an easy gravitas to Jobs’s deceased mentor Kobun, who functions as a sort of spirit guide. Tenor Jonathan Burton gamely leaned into the comic material for the Steve Wozniak character, showing off an attractive sound particularly in Wozniak’s passage scolding Jobs.

Scott Suchman

Winona Martin’s warm mezzo yielded an appealing presence as spouse Laurene Powell Jobs, while soprano Kresley Figueroa’s bright soprano shone in the wounded passages as the mother of the child that he ruthlessly tries to suppress.

Lidiya Yankovskaya led the WNO Orchestra in a nicely textured reading of the score, successfully deploying driving tempi that added excitement to the big ensembles. Members of the Washington National Opera Chorus (prepared by Steven Gathman) made fine contributions as well, bringing clarity and detail to the tricky passages for Apple employees, journalists, etc.

The well-traveled production, originally created by Tomer Zvulun and directed here by Rebecca Herman, effectively manages the work’s many moving pieces. Sets by Jacob Climer combine a simple playing space and catwalk with banks of flat screens as well as projections against the flats (by Katy S. Tucker). It was a suitably functional machine, though also felt a bit generic for an opera about a master of design; one could easily imagine this being reused for a Rigoletto set in an office or something.