Mount Washington Composer Ponders Life's Big Questions in 'The Blur or How to Marry a Billionaire'

If the mention of opera conjures up images of zaftig blondes in braids and horned helmets, the operas of Mount Washington's Peter Wing Healey will give skeptics a new perspective on the traditional art form. 

The Tree, which debuted in 2006, promotes environmental sustainability.  The Norma (1991), co-written with composer Linda Dowdell, explored the clash between nature and industry in the form of a myth.  And Wing Healey mixes sexy secretaries, amenable boy toys and machine guns at a lost Mayan temple in his newest comic opera The Blur or How to Marry a Billionaire, which debuts as a Public Reading on Saturday, June 11, at 7 p.m. in the South Pasadena Public Library Community Room.

“I want to make operas about our world today that touch a nerve,” confirms Wing Healey, the founder and artistic director of The Mesopotamian Opera Company.

The Blur, which aims a sardonic eye at current, corporate economic excess, touches a nerve. However, during a recent rehearsa at Wing Healey's Moon Avenue Home, it also tickled funny bones.  In attendance was famed choreographer Mark Morris, with whom Wing Healey has long worked as both a dancer and rehearsal director (most recently on John Adams' and Peter Sellars’ Nixon in China).

As the voices of Wing Healey’s cast soared through the French doors of the living room and into the sunlit yard toward the San Gabriel Mountains, Morris followed along, tapping the libretto, laughing at the often saucy dialogue and involuntarily “conducting” the singers along with accompanist and conductor Galina Barskaya of the Kiev Conservatory.  Later at the Music Center of Los Angeles County, where Morris’s landmark L’Allegro was finally getting its Los Angeles debut, Wing Healey says his colleague “raved” about conductor Barskaya and pronounced The Blur  "insane, complicated, fabulous and brilliant."

Given The Blur’s contemporary subject matter, it’s something of a surprise to learn that it is a broadly based "blank parody" of Countess Maritza, a lesser-known operetta that debuted in Vienna in 1924 and on Broadway two years later.  Wing Healey’s introduction to the somewhat obscure  operetta is worthy of a theatrical treatment itself.  He admits that he had “heard of [Countess Maritza] but didn’t know anything about it” until his partner Don Blasius brought a recorded excerpt of it back from a trip to Vienna.

According to Wing Healey's retelling, an elderly Viennese psychoanalyst who had studied with Freud left “a pile of old opera scores” to his son, a colleague of Blasius’s in the UCLA Math Department.  The colleague passed along the score of Countess Maritza to Wing Healey, who saw a parallel between today’s “Gilded Age” excesses and Countess Maritza’s Jazz Age story of an heiress pursued by suitors for her money.

Wing Healy says he is committed to engaging contemporary audiences via contemporary subjects, but adds that ultimately it is most important for him to  “pick a topic [I’m] interested in enough to feel passionate about, to write music about…and then to just keep working.  Keep my head down and work and keep doing it and keep doing it.”

Wing Healey says that the goal of the June 11 staged reading is to “make a little film” of The Blur or How to Marry a Billionaire so that “we can send it around” to potential producers and production entities.

Needless to say, all billionaires are cordially invited.

The Blur or How to Marry a Billionaire will be performed on Saturday, June 11, at 7:00 p.m. at the South Pasadena Public Library Community Room, 1100 Oxley Street (enter from El Centro), South Pasadena, CA 91030.

The event is open to all and NO MONEY can be taken at the door but tax-deductible suggested donations of $25 can be sent via check to The Mesopotamian Opera Company, Inc., a 510(c)3 organization, at 835 Moon Avenue, Los Angeles, CA  90065 or online at www.mesopotamianopera.org