2023 Showtime miniseries<\/a>, but the opera keeps its focus tightly on the emotional fault lines between Hawk and Tim. With an ensemble of nine singers, it sketches the surrounding machinery of power with economy: McCarthy appears only briefly, and Roy Cohn, McCarthy\u2019s chief counsel, remains offstage. The system looms; the drama stays personal.<\/p>\nDirector Kevin Newbury, who has shepherded the opera since its inception, responds as keenly to the architecture of Spears\u2019 score as to Pierce\u2019s tightly crafted libretto. Compact scenes shift with the logic of film editing \u2014 from the Dupont Circle park bench framing the opera to Capitol Hill offices and Tim\u2019s cramped apartment. The transitions can feel abrupt, yet Newbury allows emotional resonance to carry across scenes, so private exchanges echo amid the external apparatus of power.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Vita Tzykun\u2019s scenic design and Thomas C. Hase\u2019s lighting support that economy on an open stage where rolling elements swiftly reconfigure the space. Filing cabinets and desks conjure the sterile bureaucracy of the \u201cMan in the Gray Flannel Suit\u201d era \u2014 reinforced by Devario D. Simmons\u2019 disciplined midcentury suits, their grays and navy blues punctuated by strategic flashes of color. At moments, tailored propriety gives way to underwear and brief nudity, underscoring the vulnerable intimacy \u2014 and real passion \u2014 at the story\u2019s core.<\/p>\n
Spears\u2019 music combines the driving pulsations of American minimalism with elaborate ornamental phrases and dance-inflected rhythms that evoke the Renaissance and Baroque and lend a poetic, faintly ceremonial air, as if the lovers were enacting a courtly ritual within the drab machinery of midcentury Washington.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Spears proves a natural opera composer and writes gratefully for the voice, balancing speech-inflected rhythms with stylized ornament and differentiating his characters through vocal line.<\/p>\n
As Tim, tenor Colin Aikins brought passion and ringing tone to a punishing role spanning naivet\u00e9, spiritual conflict and hard-won disillusionment. His confessional \u201cLast Night\u201d aria was a searing high point, underscored by newfound ecstasy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Baritone Jarrett Ott made Hawk magnetic and imposing, his dark tone projecting confidence that bordered on arrogance. His cool composure in \u201cpassing\u201d the polygraph meant to detect \u201cdeviance\u201d contrasted with an aria sung in his lowest register, where the weight of his decision to end the relationship registered starkly.<\/p>\n
(Seattle Opera has double cast the roles of Timothy and Hawkins for this production, which are being sung by Andy Acosta and Joseph Lattanzi in alternate performances.)<\/p>\n
As Mary Johnson, Hawk’s assistant, Amber R. Monroe emerged as the opera\u2019s moral center. Though given less stage time, she invested the role with warmth, intelligence and expressive depth; her duet with Tim offered rare compassion in a world of calculation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Vanessa Becerra gave the homophobic secretary Miss Lightfoot a brittle edge, her gossip edged with malice, while Elisa Sunshine made a vivid impression as Lucy, the woman Hawk marries.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Kyle Pfortmiller lent authority to Sen. Charles Potter, Tim\u2019s boss, while flashes of humor surfaced in Randell McGee\u2019s Machiavellian Tommy McIntyre, a shrewd operator and aide to the senator who dubs him \u201cCitizen Canes.\u201d Marcus DeLoach shifted deftly among multiple roles \u2014 including a sardonic, trombone-accompanied turn as McCarthy himself.<\/p>\n
Written for chamber orchestra, Spears\u2019 score gained remarkable depth from the Seattle Symphony musicians in the pit, who, under Steven Osgood, shaped its spare textures into a sound world at once intimate and unexpectedly expansive, its modest forces carrying emotional weight well beyond their scale \u2014 much like the opera itself.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yakimaherald.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Opera review Desire unfolds under watchful eyes in \u201cFellow Travelers.\u201d Set during the McCarthy-era Lavender Scare of the 1950s, the opera by composer Gregory Spears and librettist Greg Pierce opened Saturday at McCaw Hall, marking the first time a production centered on openly gay subject matter has appeared on Seattle Opera\u2019s mainstage. The run \u2014 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2296631,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[21741],"class_list":["post-2296630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/\u2018Fellow-Travelers-at-Seattle-Opera-review-Private-passion-public-peril.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2296630"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2296632,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2296630\/revisions\/2296632"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2296631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2296630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2296630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2296630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}