New Santa Fe Opera offering, ‘The Letter,’ is short, steamy ‘opera noir’ based on Maugham work

‘Opera noir’ latest new offering at Santa Fe Opera

SANTA FE, N.M. — Gunshots. A dead lover. A cigarette-puffing leading lady whose neck could end up in a noose. Welcome to “opera noir.”

The Santa Fe Opera’s latest original offering, “The Letter,” is classic opera mayhem in a compact, stylish package.

Based on a short story — later turned into a play — by W. Somerset Maugham, “The Letter” also was an Oscar-nominated movie in 1940 starring Bette Davis.

The tale of love and revenge on a steamy rubber plantation is “naturally operatic,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec, who teamed up with librettist Terry Teachout to create the opera that has its world premiere Saturday night.

“We’re not trying to make an opera out of a movie,” Moravec said in an interview. “However, the look that we wanted is something that you’d see in international film noir.”

For contemporary audiences, the experience of storytelling has been almost exclusively shaped by film, said Teachout, the drama critic for The Wall Street Journal.

“We wrote this opera for a general audience. … Therefore, we thought, OK, let’s make it feel like a film, and let’s give it the time scale of a film,” he added.

No four-hour extravaganza here: It’s 95 minutes, with no intermission, from the opening volley of gunfire to the final curtain.

Set in the jungle of British Malaya between the world wars, the “The Letter” is the story of Leslie Crosbie, who kills her faithless lover, lies about the affair to her husband, and faces trial for murder. Her fate, and that of those around her, hinges on a letter she wrote.

“I imagine this opera as a beautiful nightmare,” said Moravec, who won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in music for his composition “Tempest Fantasy.”

“There’s something dream-like about opera to begin with,” the composer said. “There’s something fantastic by nature about people singing at the top of their lungs with a 70-piece orchestra supporting them and commenting on the action.”

Billowing white curtains, slow-turning ceiling fans, and the constant interplay of light and shadow give the stage a “noir” look and a tropical feel — even on a chilly summer night in the open-air opera theater, which is on a hilltop outside town at an elevation of 7,000 feet.

Sung in English, the opera stars American soprano Patricia Racette as Leslie Crosbie — decked out elegantly in gowns by Tom Ford. The fashion designer, who grew up in Santa Fe and has a home here, is making his debut as an opera costume designer with “The Letter.”

The Santa Fe Opera, a summer festival, commissioned Moravec three years ago to do a new opera. He immediately turned to Teachout, a longtime friend and neighbor in Manhattan, and a prolific writer who also blogs about the arts and has a biography of Louis Armstrong coming out this year.

While it’s their first such collaboration, it’s informed by their friendship and ease with one another.

Teachout had never written for the stage but says it wasn’t intimidating to tackle something entirely new.

“Yes, it was. What are you talking about?” Morvaec interrupted with a laugh.

It was challenging, the composer added, citing the complexity and the length of the piece.

“This was the hardest thing I’ve ever written,” said Moravec, who has more than 100 compositions to his credit and is a professor at Adelphi University.

“At the end of the day, the composer is the dramatist …. All problems and all successes in opera are ultimately musical,” he said.

Moravec and Teachout were giddy with excitement after watching the opera’s first dress rehearsal.

“I wrote on my blog this morning, ‘It looks like a movie, sounds like an opera and plays like a play.’ … We’re three for three,” Teachout said.

“The Letter” also stars Anthony Michaels-Moore as Robert Crosbie, James Maddalena as lawyer Howard Joyce, and Roger Honeywell as Geoff Hammond, the slain lover.

Peformances are scheduled July 25 and 29 and Aug. 3, 7, 15 and 18.