May 22, 2023

 

A friend offered me a ticket for the final performance yesterday of Pittsburgh Opera's final show of the year, We Shall Not Be Moved. I was interested in seeing it because it had a captivating story line that incorporated a 1985 incident in Philly I remembered from when I was in college, and because it was being performed at the August Wilson Cultural Center, which I'd been wanting to go to for a while. (And "free" was an added incentive, natch.) The show felt a bit overlong in the second part, but was otherwise a haunting and often very moving hybrid piece: operatic vocals with a score that mixed modern classical and popular genres (jazz and funk mainly), augmented by spoken word, dance, and striking visual and staging effects. The latter really stood out at the end: an escalating fire projected on the stage's white flats with actors dressed as ancestral spirits standing or posing silently in stoical witness -- WOW.

And since I was there, I visited the adjacent museum afterwards, which featured photos and artifacts from or relating to Wilson's ten-play cycle on African-American life through the last century, all but one of which are set in Pgh's Hill District, where Wilson grew up. The beautiful piano pictured in this post is one of the pieces there. I've only read one of his plays to date (Fences), and have never seen one performed. I need to rectify that dearth.