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Wynne Delacoma contributor, Musical America The Light in the Piazza (Adam Guettel)
Patrick Dillon contributor, Opera, Opera News Caroline, or Change (Jeanine Tesori/Tony Kushner)
Jenna Douglas contributor, Schmopera Iron Road (Chan Ka Nin/Mark Brownell/George K. Wong)
Janos Gereben contributor, San Francisco Classical Voice Dead Man Walking (Jake Heggie/Terrence McNally)
Mark Gresham contributor, ArtsATL Dead Man Walking
George Loomis contributor, Financial Times, Opera The Wedding (William Bolcom/Robert Altman/Arnold Weinstein)
Sarah Bryan Miller critic, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Dead Man Walking
Noel Morris Producer, WFMT Radio Network Dead Man Walking
Fred Plotkin contributor, WQXR.com Dead Man Walking
John Rockwell contributor, Opera, Financial Times Caroline, or Change
Richard Sasanow opera editor, Broadway World Doctor Atomic (John Adams/Peter Sellars)
Steve Smith editor, National Sawdust Log Lost Highway (Olga Neuwirth/Elfriede Jelinek)
Brin Solomon contributor, National Sawdust Log Doctor Atomic
Heidi Waleson critic, The Wall Street Journal The Handmaid’s Tale (Poul Ruder/Paul Bentley)
Susan Graham and John Ames in the world premiere of Dead Man Walking at San Francisco Opera (photo: Kenneth Friedman)
Dead Man Walking
Based on the book by Sister Helen Prejean, C.S.J., Dead Man Walking, by composer Jake Heggie and librettist Terrence McNally, has in the course of two decades become one of the most-performed American operas of our time. The emotionally powerful, socially relevant drama recounts a nun’s encounter with a convict who is sentenced to execution for brutally murdering a pair of teenage lovers. Far more than an epistle on the controversial and challenging moral issue of the death penalty, Dead Man Walking is an exploration of the timeless and complex spiritual issues of confession, forgiveness, and redemption. From the opera’s disturbing opening moments to its emotion-crushing conclusion, Heggie underpins the drama’s many changes of scenes and moods with a solid, richly eclectic score that mingles American vernacular and modernist classical styles with ease, punctuated by dramatically emblematic tunes and some passages of genuinely beautiful music. — Mark Gresham
