Harvey Milk: The Opera in Concert

This opera on the life and murder of America’s first elected openly gay official was staged twenty years ago in Houston and New York and, after revisions, in Harvey Milk’s hometown of San Francisco.  It’s hasn’t been seen since.

Now this staged concert version with a cast backed by the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Choir, a one-off at Sydney Town Hall, follows a season at Melbourne’s Midsumma Festival. 

Harvey Milk, a camera salesman, came late to gay activism and running to be a City Board Supervisor.  He and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were both shot dead in 1978 by another, former supervisor, Dan White.   

His assassination, a decade after the Stonewall riots in New York, gave the gay movement a powerful political martyrdom.  This full operatic treatment, of course, further ennobles his story and his cause, but leaves room for endearing personal details and doubts surrounding Milk and his relationships. 

The love duet between Harvey (Tod Strike) and his younger partner Scott (Edward Grey) is beautifully tender, their patter crisp with a Broadway articulation. 

Touches of blues and jazz elsewhere inform Stewart Wallace’s score while a more operative register is used for the confessional angst of White (Jacob Caine) and whatever Dimity Shepherd is singing about as Milk’s campaign manager.  Michael Korie’s lyrics are often lost without the benefit of surtitles or clearly articulated performances. 

The abbreviated length of this concert version, half that of the opera, also cuts and pastes the narrative without much care for audience comprehension. The strength of this version, directed by Cameron Lukey, is in the 90-odd choristers, conducted by Sarah Penicka-Smith. They musicalize powerful moments of violence, sorrow and gay affirmation.  

Interestingly, the choristers and large, mostly gay audience were almost all mature age, enjoying a cultural experience but also one communal and political.  Who knows who will wave these flags, and witness that history, in the future.

Martin Portus

Image: Tod Strike as Harvey Milk