Beale Street Dynasty – Memphis Flyer

If you’re an opera lover, you may think you know La Bohème, Giacomo Puccini’s masterpiece about life in 19th-century Paris. After all, it’s not only one of the most-performed operas in the world, but the most popular work in the 68-year history of Opera Memphis.

Think again.

When Opera Memphis presents its latest version of La Bohème at the Scheidt Family Performing Arts Center this Friday and Saturday, you’d best discard any preconceptions before the curtains rise. For, while the music will be performed as the classic score dictates, complete with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, the mise-en-scène will be both unfamiliar and, for Memphians, eerily familiar. Rather than being set in bohemian Paris in the 1830s, this version unfolds on Beale Street, circa 1915.

Dennis Whitehead Darling (Photo: Andrea Zucker )

“I wish I could take credit for this inception of it,” says stage director Dennis Whitehead Darling, “but it’s actually the brainchild of [Opera Memphis general director] Ned Canty. It’s been a pet project of his for many years, and the original idea came from a book that Ned read called Beale Street Dynasty.”

Nearly anyone with an interest in our city’s history knows that book well, subtitled Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis, wherein Preston Lauterbach vividly evokes the bustling urban milieu, both creative and destructive, that made Beale Street ground zero for Black America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “Because Paris in the 1830s was a place where artists and musicians and philosophers and writers came together, it was a cultural center for its time. And the same thing was happening here in Memphis. I think that’s what sparked the idea for setting La Bohème on Beale Street,” says Darling.

Indeed, the similarities between the two cities of different eras were so profound that the original opera slotted neatly into the new setting. “Originally, we were going to write something new, or Ned was, but we moved away from that and have kept most of the original text the same,” says Darling.

Jeri Lynne Johnson (Photo: Vanessa Briceno)

As conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson points out, that maintains the integrity of Puccini’s original vision. “Audience members who are fluent in Italian may realize that a couple of things have changed,” she says, “but for the most part, we’ve done this without actually changing the text, which the singers have grown up learning for years and years in the Italian language. Of course, Puccini’s music is so tied to the language, so in order to avoid changing too many actual words, and making sure they stand with the music, there are just a couple of word changes, and some of those are simply within the subtitles.”

Meanwhile, the stage set is similarly subtle. “We’re doing something a little bit more abstract,” says Darling, “using projection screens. It’s minimal but effective. With projections, we’ve layered photos of different buildings and businesses that were part of Beale. Reimagining this in a very minimal way is always challenging, but things that are challenging also allow you to be more creative — oftentimes the things you find challenging are actually opportunities.”

And yet in one regard, there will be plenty of striking visuals, as Darling points out. “We have beautiful costume designs by Jennifer Gillette. That’s been the icing on the cake as we enter tech week because we initially created this show without seeing all of our visual elements. We didn’t have the projections, lighting, or costumes until much later. And it’s always amazing when I see these actors wear their costumes. Another level of character development happens almost immediately, where they just embody these characters, wearing these costumes that Jennifer has designed. They really transform our modern day actors and singers into these period characters.”

The impact of that visual element is deep, as Johnson points out, addressing a whole culture that’s so often rendered invisible. “I’ve done world premieres for the Santa Fe Opera and for the Chicago Opera Theater that had a predominantly African-American casts, having canonical works reimagined with African Americans in the roles. But what makes this particular production so interesting is, it isn’t just the casting, it is really transplanting that bohemian lifestyle into a uniquely Memphian historical period on Beale Street. The setting and the cast together really give you a sense of African-American life at that time. It adds an element of questioning what art is, and who makes art, where moral judgments are embedded into the aesthetic ones.”

Preston Lauterbach called it “a revelation.” The former Memphis magazine staff writer and onetime contributor to the Memphis Flyer was referring to his research into the life of Robert Church Sr., a man who helped make Beale Street the Main Street of black America beginning in the late 19th century and for several decades to follow. Lauterbach, author of The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll (2011), tells the story of Church (born to a white father and black mother) and of his son, Robert Church Jr., in the pages of his latest book, Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis (W.W. Norton), and it’s Beale Street — and the city of Memphis itself — as you probably never knew it or would hardly recognize it.

There were saloons, gambling, music, and brothels on and around Beale, for sure. But the street was a commercial hub too and a center for black newspaper publishing, churchgoing, and political organizing. For many black Americans, it was, in short, “the place to be, the place to get to,” Lauterbach said in a recent phone interview. “It was Harlem 30 years before the Harlem Renaissance. It was vital to national culture.” It was also the key to political power in Memphis and beyond.

“Mr. Crump wouldn’t have been able to build his machine without Beale,” Lauterbach said. “Beale won the state of Tennessee in the 1920 presidential election for the Republican Party! That blows me away.”

As Beale Street Dynasty makes plain, the influence of African-American voters in Memphis — organized through the efforts of Church Sr. and Jr. and right-hand man Lt. George W. Lee — was well recognized by black and white politicians alike, and it worked both ways. According to Lauterbach in his book, “Crump needed votes to get his candidates into office, and Church aimed to help his people.” Both Churches, father and son, did indeed help their people.

It was no paradise for black Memphians, Lauterbach was quick to add in our interview. This was still the period of Jim Crow and lynchings, which were reported on most notably by African-American journalist Ida B. Wells, who started her career on Beale, site of the city’s first black-owned printing press. But it was the black vote that set Memphis apart and made it, in Lauterbach’s words, “unlike virtually every other place in the South.”

“We know Beale is a powerful place,” he said. “It has a reputation, a mystique. But who were the people behind it? We know about Ida B. Wells and W.C. Handy and the music. But what was the ‘backbone’ to Beale history? How do we put all this together?”

Those were questions Lauterbach asked himself when he began looking into Beale Street’s long history. And Beale’s a long way from San Diego, where Lauterbach grew up. It’s his “outsider” status, however, that’s helped him in his 100-year history of Beale, from the Civil War to World War II. There have been previous histories, but none so deeply researched or definitive in the telling.

“I didn’t go into this with an agenda,” Lauterbach said. “You know, Memphis has had its ass kicked in recent decades, we gotta make this look as good as possible for the rest of the world. And no, I don’t have a great-grandfather who owned a cotton firm. But history is so heavy in Memphis that in certain respects it does take an outsider to see it.”

Not quite such an outsider. Lauterbach lives today in Virginia with his wife, Elise (who grew up in Memphis), and their children, but he’s currently a visiting scholar at Rhodes College, so he and his family return to the city regularly. As he said, “We’re all still part-time citizens.”

Thursday, March 19th, is the official launch date of Beale Street Dynasty, and to mark the occasion Lauterbach will be speaking inside Rhodes’ McCallum Ballroom of the Bryan Campus Life Center at 6 p.m., booksigning to follow. For more on Rhodes’ three-day “Beale Street Symposium,” see this week’s Flyer calendar or go to rhodes.edu/bealestreetsymposium.