Lyric Opera Presents Color-saturated, Dance-filled Entertainment

By Hilary Larkin

Special to KC Arts Beat

‘An everyday epic’ is how Jose Pepe Martinez and Leonard Foglia’s mariachi opera, Cruzar la Cara de la Luna, has been described. The Lyric Opera of Kansas City vivaciously performed this bittersweet story of migration. The scenes take in three generations and flip between two locales and periods. The contrasts are bold and simple. The ‘North’ is technically Kansas City, but the particular place is, in fact, immaterial; it could be anywhere USA; the ‘South’ is rural Mexico. In the North (the present), the endearingly aged but still-skittish Laurentino (Octavio Moreno) is trying, from his deathbed under stark lighting, to make sense of his past and his longing for home. The South of his past represents a world that is color-saturated, dance-filled and, of course, accompanied by mariachi. It’s not the first occasion in the entertainment business that one has to leave Kansas to find some technicolor. 

And yet it is a world that Laurentino wanted to get away from fifty years ago, and in one of the most striking set-pieces of the work, he lays out his reasons for seasonal labor across the border, promising his wife that she will thereby have ten times a bigger house, ten times the amount of clothes, of food, and of money.  At each point, his wife, Renata, sung with fierce passion and hard-edged strength by Cecilia Durante, counters him, showing her truer psycho-emotional depth. But she cannot counter his final confession, as he bellows out: ‘I’ll be ten times more the man’. He goes away because he needs to feel, as a male, that he is a powerful provider. There are any number of by-ways one could explore here but there is not a moment to spare (and the dichotomies Laurentino does later reflect on when he moves – e.g. In the North, people do not know how to love – are sometimes over-egged and lacking in interiority). 

Renata herself explores the ironies of an absent, ‘providing’ spouse with another hard-edged strong woman-friend, Lupita (sung with a suitable rasp by Vanessa Alonzo). Yet, Renata’s sudden death, while pregnant, on the journey up north, cuts off that source of complicated reflection. When she returns (as a ghost), she’s caught back onto the mariachi spirit, and we are supposed to, also. ‘Mum I miss you’, her grown-up son, a finely articulate, brooding Rafael (Daniel Montenegro) sings. ‘You shouldn’t’, is her brisk reply ‘let’s dance. Dance, enjoy, be happy’. And so they do. Jejeune, if we’re chasing some beyond-the-grave psychodrama, perhaps, but culturally spot-on. I’ve been at enough of my Mexican relatives’ weddings to understand the primacy of dance as cultural form— being Irish in the Yeatsian fashion, with my ‘abiding sense of tragedy, which sustains me through temporary periods of joy’, I confess to having to retreat for a little private existential crisis of my own every so often; yet they dance on. 

Default joy is likely quite a healthy way to be, and trauma continues to be held lightly here, in a story that is technically full of it. That said, Mark, (Federico de Michelis), Laurentino’s stateside son, intoned his whole performance with a lonesome, melancholic note, and there was a strikingly sad and angry duet between Laurentino and Rafael (the left-behind motherless Mexican son) where there is deft vocal and emotional blending. 

Considering the healing of the rift that must take place before the feckless patriarch’s death, I would rather have wished for a bit more vocal work here, when they do finally meet again. The limelight instead goes to a new character, the Mexican granddaughter (also called Renata, and a walking image of her dead grandmother; of course, she is played by the grandmother). I loved the powerful two-female, two-male voice quartet that they sing at the subsequent funeral, but I confess I did miss the emotional work of healing between father and son.  A final handhold before the last gasp wasn’t enough. 

The thirteen-strong Mariachi los Camperos band who did what a mariachi band does so well, providing cheery, sunny, shadowless and pacey music that makes you want to keep up your heels and dance, whatever your traumas. The central motif—the monarch butterflies who ‘cross the face of the moon’ was well-handled. Apart from the fluttery feel-good motif, not least at the funeral, the central character himself is a bit of a butterfly (spiritually as well as geographically), and his most profound self-revelation occurs when he realizes that it’s never the same butterflies who return; three generations have lived and died during their migration. It is the fourth that return. We remember what he said, as we look at the four characters (two sons, two granddaughters) in Mexico for the funeral, and we feel hope for the future in a rain of butterflies. There’s no place like home. It just mayn’t be Kansas.