Cal Performances collaborates with the San Francisco Opera to stage the West Coast premiere of Three Decembers.

Great artists with Berkeley on their minds sometimes surprise you with their candor. In the middle of a chat with two renowned Bay Area musicians—San Francisco-based composer/pianist Jake Heggie and Alameda’s beloved mezzo-soprano, Frederica von Stade—Heggie suddenly declared, “I grew up in love with musical theater. I thought that was what my career was going to be. I had no idea I was going to be an opera composer.”

To those who were moved to tears by Heggie’s galvanizing treatment of the death penalty at the 2000 San Francisco Opera world premiere of his opera Dead Man Walking, his Broadway aspirations may come as something of a shock. Even more surprising was the one-two punch from Flicka (as Frederica von Stade is known to many in the opera world) for whose extraordinary, heart-tugging artistry Heggie tailored the roles of the mothers in Dead Man Walking, which premiered at San Francisco Opera, and his chamber opera Three Decembers, which opens in Zellerbach Hall this month.

“Broadway was my first love too,” Flicka revealed without missing a beat. “I didn’t even have much interest in being an opera singer. Opera was the route to get to Broadway, and I got a little waylaid.”

On December 11, in collaboration with San Francisco Opera, Cal Performances stages the West Coast premiere of Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer’s Three Decembers. Based on a short play by Terrence McNally, the work merges operatic and Broadway idioms into a chamber opera/music theater gem that explores three decades of the challenging inter-generation relationship between glamorous actress Madeline Mitchell (Maddy) and her two grown children, Beatrice (Bea) and Charlie.

Charlie, as we soon discover, is a gay man living in San Francisco with his lover Burt, who is ill with AIDS. With several scenes set in the city across the Bay, and others in New York City, the chamber opera seems tailor-made for the Bay Area’s diverse, socially conscious population.

Genesis

Heggie spent seven years waiting for the right circumstances to create a music theater piece based on Terrence McNally’s short play, Some Christmas Letters. The 14-page play, which McNally created for an AIDS benefit in Carnegie Hall in December of 1999, was produced only once. Its stellar cast consisted of Julie Harris (Madeline), Cherry Jones (Beatrice), and Victor Garber (Charlie), with musical accompaniment provided by the Gay Men’s Chorus of New York.

The cast for Heggie’s chamber opera is equally impressive.

Flicka, who encountered a few detours on her road to Broadway, plays Madeline. She started at the top of her profession. In her early 20s, during the Metropolitan Opera National Auditions, she received an on-the-spot contract from Met General Manager Sir Rudolf Bing. By age 25, she had made her Met debut. La Scala, Covent Garden, Vienna State Opera, Paris, San Francisco Opera, Chicago Lyric, and a host of other major international houses soon called her far from Broadway’s Great White Way.

Thirty-eight years later, Flicka remains a major presence on the operatic stage. Revered as much for her lightness and gaiety as her profundity—she has been known to soar with sparkling ease one minute, and tear your heart out with pathetic tones the next—she is still one of the most miraculously communicative singers of our age.

Another of Heggie’s favorite singers, soprano Kristin Clayton, plays Beatrice. Gorgeously voiced and visaged Met baritone Keith Phares plays Charlie. Ten chamber musicians complete the musical personnel, including Heggie at one piano, and conductor Patrick Summers at the other.

Heggie first learned of McNally’s play after Dead Man Walking’s premiere, when he was looking for another project to do with McNally that would also involve Flicka. Once McNally showed him the script, he recognized it as a music drama.

“It felt like one of the truest, most beautiful things I’d ever read of his,” says Heggie. “I loved that it was a theater story, that the mother was impossible—controversial yet lovable—and extraordinarily, ravishingly gifted. She’s one of these people who walks onstage and astounds people. But her personal life is a little bit of a shambles.”

“I was in tears,” Flicka recalls upon first reading the play. “It’s a real piece of Terrence’s heart, this little gem. I thought it was just amazing.”

Cal Performances’ Robert Cole became an instant champion of the piece. “When I first read the play,” Heggie says, “I sent it to Robert and asked if he would help me develop something with it. He’s been its enthusiastic godfather from the very beginning.”

While Heggie searched for a musical identity for the project, McNally began enlarging the initial conception. Soon there were additional characters, a chorus and a whole lot more. Finally, Flicka spoke up, pointing out that they had gotten away from what had impressed everyone about the piece in the first place: its intimacy, three characters and three different decades.

“The story is very real and very intimate,” says Flicka. “It wasn’t meant to be great, huge theater. It’s very accessible, and needed to remain so.”

Thanks to librettist Gene Scheer’s storytelling mastery, the work began to take form as “intimate music theater for opera singers.” First, Houston Grand Opera became the lead commissioner. (The world premiere took place earlier this year in Houston’s Cullen Theater, which seats 1,000.) David Gockley, former head of Houston Grand Opera, now San Francisco Opera’s general director, brought on San Francisco Opera as co-commissioner. With Cal Performances also onboard, everyone agreed that the piece, originally entitled Last Acts, would receive its West Coast premiere, not in the vast War Memorial Opera House, but in Berkeley’s more appropriately-sized, if not exactly intimate, Zellerbach Hall.

At First Sight

“What I love about this piece,” says Heggie, “is that the main character is a Broadway musical theater star whose life story dominates, whether her children like it or not. In fact, musically they fight against it a lot. That’s the musical language that dominates the piece, because Madeline’s character dominates the piece. It was real fun to give what I love about musical theater to Flicka—to create a piece where she’s an opera singer being the Broadway person she grew up wanting to be.”

“It’s a theater story about balancing family and career,” notes Flicka, who recorded one of her great song recitals in 1977, just 48 hours before the birth of the first of two daughters. “That’s pertinent to everybody, especially to women who know that they can’t be home putting their children to bed because they’re putting on their makeup to go onstage. Even though what they get paid may be [used for] educating the kids, there’s still that sense of not being where you would rather be. You have to cross that bridge in your personal life if you’re going to be a performer. You cross it millions of times. There used to be a physical ache when I would leave the house, knowing I was going to be away for a week or 10 days or more.”

“Three Decembers is about families today and the struggles they deal with,” says Heggie, a married gay man who is stepdad to his partner’s 13-year old son. “It’s part of what really drew us to the story, because we both experience those things.”

Equally relevant to life in 2008 is the story of living with AIDS, and the kind of relationship that Maddy’s daughter Bea is dealing with. Bea, a stay-at-home mom with a wealthy husband, not only feels that she’s always being compared to her mother, but she’s also miserable.

Flicka cites a moment at the very end of the show when Madeline turns to the audience, looks at her kids and says something like, “I think they’re gonna be okay now, don’t you?”

“The greatest thing that can happen to a mother,” Flicka says, “is to know her kids are going to be okay, and that you—I—haven’t ruined them by my life choices. As a young Catholic girl—‘yes, Reverend Mother, no, Reverend Mother’—I went from ‘don’t look at me’ to show business. ‘Look at me! If you’re not lookin’ at me, I’m going to blow your brains out!’ It was almost like converting to another religion. The guilt part I had down real well.”

Flicka continues, “I have since learned to forgive myself for being Madeline Mitchell. I’m not as larger-than-life as the wonderful character that Jake has written, but I have a lot of her in me, a lot of single-mindedness and shortsightedness. ‘You know, I’m sorry, I need to perform now. I’m onstage in five minutes.’ This is my life. It’s been a real privilege to explore and forgive this part of me.”

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Three Decembers runs in Zellerbach Hall on Dec. 11 (7:30 p.m.), Dec. 12 (8 p.m.) and Dec. 14 (3 p.m.). For tickets, call (510) 642-9988 or visit www.calperformances.org.

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Music critic Jason Victor Serinus is a professional whistler who lives in Oakland with his husband David. Between writing for Carnegie Hall, Stereophile, San Francisco Magazine, sfcv.org, and 12 other publications, he serves on Oakland’s Community Policing Task Force and Advisory Board. See www.jasonserinus.com.