Art: Mo Willems.
One day in spring, the school that two of my grandchildren attend had a dress-as-your-favorite-character day. The school principal wore a Mo Willems T-shirt that warned, “Don’t let the Pigeon drive the bus.”
Did you love that book series? Now that all four grandkids are reading advanced books, I feel a certain nostalgia for the Pigeon days. Fortunately, I can still see Pigeon at the opera.
David Allen writes at the New York Times, “Do you know the words to the Queen of the Night’s stratospheric showcase from ‘The Magic Flute’? Maybe the Duke’s famous tune from ‘Rigoletto’? Carmen’s Habanera?
“No, not those words. The other ones: the words, at least, as they are now known to my 6-year-old daughter and the hundreds of children who took grown-ups like me to the Kennedy Center here recently for the premiere of ‘The Ice Cream Truck Is Broken! & Other Emotional Arias,‘ an experiment, including a short new work by the composer Carlos Simon, in what it might mean to draw a very young and impossibly demanding audience into a life in opera.
“See, you might think that Carmen is relating her views on love, but no. Listen closely, and you’ll find that the singer should have shared her cotton candy with her friends, and absolutely will … tomorrow. ‘La donna è mobile’? That’s about how milk squirts out your nose if you happen to laugh at exactly the wrong time. The Queen’s aria? That’s still about anger, but it now invokes something far worse than the vengeance of hell.
“ ‘This bicycle,’ it begins, in a fit of preschool pique, ‘is such a poo-poo vehicle.’
“Opera’s great composers have a new librettist, and he is almost certainly the only person who could induce an institution like the Kennedy Center to do something like this, let alone get Renée Fleming to join him in hosting it; inspire a quintet of young singers to ham their way through it; and persuade Simon, one of the busiest composers around, to crown the show with a 20-minute piece that gives an attention-seeking, picture-book Pigeon the prima donna spotlight it has surely always craved.
“The writer for it all? Mo Willems, who, it turns out, really loves opera! …
“ ‘It’s big emotions. … It’s direct communication. It’s interior dialogue. It’s self-discovery.’ …
“Willems has always been a broader artist than just a writer of picture books, though that task alone is such that he calls it ‘as easy as describing the history of Byzantium in three words.’ Some of his most celebrated characters — who include a venturesome plushie called Knuffle Bunny, the on-and-off best friends Elephant and Piggie, and that insatiable, inimitable Pigeon — had already starred in musicals that he had written before he formalized his long association with the Kennedy Center in 2019, when he became its education artist in residence. That three-year position coincided with the pandemic, to which he responded with invaluable ‘Lunch Doodles‘ videos, but it still let him explore a range of genres, including symphonic music, which he said ‘has always been important to me.’
“ ‘Beethoven’s Fifth is the easiest example,’ he explained, ‘but it’s basically the arc of an episode of television, or a movie: “Ba-ba-ba-baaam,” oh, it’s exciting — and then you take the theme, you take the theme, and then you build with it. So when I was writing a show called “Codename: Kids Next Door,” which is a silly sort of action comedy, I would literally write to the symphony.’
“For the National Symphony Orchestra, Willems painted giant abstractions to accompany a cycle of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, and he worked with the musician Ben Folds to adapt one of his books, ‘Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs,‘ for the concert hall. Hearing plans for ‘Goldilocks’ led Tim O’Leary, the general director of the Washington National Opera and a Willems-reading father of three, to inquire about a commission. …
“The author quickly sent him a copy of an Elephant and Piggie book — ‘I Really Like Slop!‘ — with the inscription ‘Tim, this book really sings.’ By their second encounter, Willems had the libretto in his head, a sketch of the characters in concert dress and a title: ‘SLOPERA!‘
“ ‘Obviously, once it was called the “SLOPERA!” we had to do it,’ O’Leary said.
“ ‘SLOPERA!’ could only be performed live outdoors on account of the pandemic, but an indoor recording, with piano accompaniment, was shown virtually to more than 300,000 schoolchildren. Piggie gets Gerald the Elephant to try slop, a stinky green delicacy among porcine foodies. He does, after his initial refusals upset his companion, and he endures the consequences in something like a bel canto mad (or death) scene. He recovers, though, and tells Piggie that while he might not like her food, he still likes her. …
“Willems said, reflecting on what writing his first libretto taught him, aside from the importance of placing consonants carefully. ‘If you look at a picture book manuscript, and you can understand it, it has too many words. If you look at just the illustrations, and you can understand it, the drawings are too detailed. They both have to be incomprehensible. It’s very similar with writing an opera, that the words that you’re using have to be dependent on the music, but the music has to be dependent on the words, and either of them shouldn’t really be able to stand alone.’ …
“[Oznur] Tuluoglu, a young soprano whose most recent prior role was Barbarina at the Annapolis Opera, took on the title character. ‘When you train, you have to be able to sing Mozart, you gotta be able to be a pigeon.’ “
More at the Times, here.
I worked with a special ed student who could not settle down without Mo Willems books.
Interesting. How old?
He was in kindergarten and I worked with him in first as well. He actually started reading without those books.
Lovely to know. Willems has a real gift for accessing children’s emotions, including mean feelings. It seems to make them happy to have those emotions recognized and accepted.
Including knowing how to take advantage of whatever opportunities come his way.
Important!