Opera "Margaret Garner" Box Office Bonanza

   Blockbuster may not adequately describe "Margaret Garner," the Richard Danielpour/Toni Morrison opera about escaped slave Margaret Garner, opening at 8 tonight at Music Hall.
   With 9,069 tickets sold as of 5 p.m. Wednesday, sales exceed those of Jake Heggie's highly popular "Dead Man Walking" in 2002 (8,787).
   That's more than the opera's goal of 8,000, with a week to go before the final performance.
   Broken down, there are 3,091 tickets sold for tonight's opening, 3,006 for Saturday's 8 p.m. repeat and 2,972 for July 22. All performances are at 8 p.m. at Music Hall.
   Music Hall holds over 3,400 (3,516 according to the Music Hall Web site, fewer depending on utilization of handicapped accessible areas). More than 200 seats afford obstructed views. Still, chances are the opera will sell out, said opera marketing director Chris Milligan.
   "Margaret Garner," said opera general director and CEO Patricia K. Beggs, is simply "a dream come true. We can't wait for Cincinnati audiences to experience this powerful and deeply moving new opera."
   The cast is star-studded, with mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves as Margaret, baritone Gregg Baker as Margaret's husband, Robert, soprano Angela Brown as Cilla and baritone Rod Gilfry as slave owner Edward Gaines.
   It was a hit at the world premiere in Detroit in May, receiving laudatory reviews from all over the country. It has been profiled in Oprah and Billboard magazines, featured on the PBS "News Hour" and is already being programmed by other opera companies.
   Opera Carolina in Charlotte will present it in April, 2006, with a new cast.
   Critics from all over the region - Indianapolis, Dayton, Columbus, Louisville, Lexington, even Toronto and New York - are expected to attend the performances in Cincinnati.
   Local interest, spurred by news reports and a year's worth of opera preview events, is keen. WCPO-TV's Tuesday evening special, "The Journey of Margaret Garner," was the highest rated locally produced show in the station's recent history. With a 5.10 rating, it beat NBC prime programming, which included Major League Baseball's All-Star Game, and earned the highest prime time share points.
   "Margaret Garner" and "Dead Man Walking" are strikingly similar. Both are new American operas with highly accessible musical scores. Both explore hot-button issues. "Dead Man Walking" is about capital punishment. "Margaret Garner" is about slavery. Feelings about "Margaret Garner" are stronger here than in other venues because the events it is based upon took place in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky.
   The opera is not literal truth. As in her best-selling novel "Beloved," also inspired by Garner's tragic story, Nobel laureate Morrison put her own literary spin on "Margaret Garner." In effect, it is about slavery itself, a kind of modern day "Uncle Tom's Cabin," with Margaret Garner the symbol of slavery's universal devastation. All of the issues are there, murder, rape, lynching and de-humanization under the law, all tied up into one powerful and very operatic package.
   The historical facts are few, known only from contemporary news sources (the trial records are lost). What is certain is that 22-year-old Margaret, a slave owned by the Gaines family of Maplewood Farm in Boone County, killed her 2-year-old child, Mary, when confronted with slave catchers after escaping with her husband and his family across the frozen Ohio River in 1856. They were tried before a federal commissioner in Cincinnati under the terms of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and remanded to slavery in Kentucky.
   Margaret died of typhoid fever on a Mississippi plantation in 1858. Robert fought with the Union in the Civil War and died later in the North. There is plausible speculation that Margaret's owner fathered the slain child.
   In the opera, Margaret is raped by Gaines, Robert is lynched, she kills two of her children, is tried for "theft of property" in Kentucky and sentenced to death by hanging.
   The 1856 trial became a lightning rod for pro- and anti-slavery activists and was one of the catalysts of the Civil War.
   Like Heggie's score, Grammy-winner Danielpour's music is lush and neo-romantic. There are elements of jazz and the negro spiritual. There is even a "hit song," Margaret's act I aria, "Quality Love."
   Cincinnati Opera had three goals when it announced plans to commission a new opera in 2000, said Beggs:
   "To create a new American opera of lasting artistic significance, to inspire meaningful dialogue and significant community engagement and to attract a new opera audience. The journey has been "profoundly moving and life-changing, for us as an organization and for every individual who has been touched by this project."
   (first published in The Cincinnati Post July 14, 2005