As so often happens with unusual projects, “Complications in Sue,” which is having its world premiere at Opera Philadelphia on Wednesday, started as a flight of fancy.
A few years ago, Tilda Swinton suggested to the performer Justin Vivian Bond that they do something together. Bond came up with a project she called “Complications in Sue,” in which they would both play the title character; they’d have two bodies but share the same brain. It became a bit of a running joke, except that the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo — Bond’s longtime friend and collaborator on their revue-like show “Only an Octave Apart” — took the idea seriously.
And as the new general director and president of Opera Philadelphia, Costanzo was in a position to do something about it. (Swinton’s involvement, such at it was, ended at the goofing-off stage.)
Costanzo joined Opera Philadelphia in June 2024, and that summer, he was already programming the 2025-26 season, which also would be the company’s 50th. He knew a world premiere would make a splash, but the clock was ticking, especially since a new opera’s development can take years.
Costanzo thought of Michael R. Jackson, the creator of “A Strange Loop,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2020 and the Tony Award for best musical two years later. They had been in touch because Jackson had expressed a desire to move away from show tunes and into opera. “Maybe it’s always been this way and I just didn’t notice it,” Jackson said, “but I feel like to work in the musical theater, it’s almost like now you have to be business person before you’re artist.”
Jackson was on board to write the libretto, but finding a composer to crank out an entire opera that quickly was a tall order. What if they found 10 instead?
“From a practical level,” Costanzo said, “I could only ask for so much if I wanted to call up these famous, busy composers, or even new composers, and tell them they had a delivery date in six to eight months.”
Jackson came up with the idea of tracing Sue’s life in 10 scenes representing 10 decades, from her birth to her death. He fleshed out the concept with input from Bond, who agreed to portray Sue, and each composer would be responsible for about eight minutes of music.
There were terms. “I said I would do it if I didn’t have to talk, if I didn’t have to sing, and I would only move if other people moved me because I didn’t want to do anything, because I don’t like to do anything,” Bond said dryly. This has somewhat changed, she admitted, though four vocalists handle the bulk of the singing, playing the characters in Sue’s life. Jackson incorporated everybody in the process, talking to the singers and Bond before writing the libretto.
In selecting the composers, Costanzo wanted some to have an association with the company. He enrolled the likes of Missy Mazzoli (whose opera “Breaking the Waves” premiered there in 2016); Rene Orth (“10 Days in a Madhouse,” in 2023); and the season’s composer in residence, Nathalie Joachim. Some contributors are in the early stages of their career, like Alistair Coleman, who graduated from Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia a few years ago; others are established, like Nico Muhly and Errollyn Wallen, King Charles’s master of music in Britain. Some are famous, but not as opera composers, like the jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant.
A big inspiration for the setup was the Surrealist parlor game known as exquisite corpse, in which people add bits and parts to a drawing or a text without knowing what others are contributing. The “Sue” composers saw only their scene in full, along with short descriptions of the others. They could then be as communicative with the creative team as they wanted.
Joachim, whose scene involves Sue being interviewed by a newscaster (the mezzo-soprano Rehanna Thelwell), decided to go in “totally blind,” she said in a video interview. “I thought that I would talk to Michael,” she added, “but honestly his writing was so clear and kind of very expertly done, I didn’t want to mess with it too much.”
Orth took a different tack and asked Costanzo and Zack Winokur, who is directing the production with Raja Feather Kelly, why they had chosen her for the penultimate segment, which takes place in a nursing home. “They both said that they needed the scene to hit emotionally, and they were like, ‘We know you can do that,’” she said in a video interview. “And I was like, ‘Yeah, I can do that, that’s my jam.’”
She also contacted her assigned vocalists, Thelwell and the bass-baritone Nicholas Newton. “My job as collaborator,” Orth said, “is to really exploit their strengths and to know what they’re excited about, what they enjoy doing and what they hate doing.” (The soprano Kiera Duffy and the tenor Nicky Spence complete the cast.)
Still, two directors and 10 composers is a lot, and you know what they say about having too many cooks. The production seems to have steered clear from dilution by committee, though. Costanzo credited the conductor Caren Levine for being able to work across different musical styles and said that, in effect, there was a head chef: Jackson.
“Ultimately it’s his voice that runs through,” Costanzo said. The show may be Bond’s idea, “but he is the common thread.”
Jackson’s foray into opera might not be good news for fans of Jackson’s work in musical theater. Just around the corner is “Sloth,” a collaboration with the composer William C. Banfield that will be included in MasterVoices’ “SEVEN: A Cycle of Sins” at Alice Tully Hall next month. And he has his sights set on more opera.
“I’m really trying to use this opportunity to learn as much as possible, and learn who the people are, learn who these composers are,” Jackson said. “I got the opera bug, for serious. Anybody out there, if you want a weird librettist who’s very collaborative. …”
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