Matthew Shepard (1976-1998).
If ever there were a time when a work of art coincides with current events, that time will be Friday, when sections of a new opera with an anti-bullying theme have their premiere as the air is still thick with the sorrow of the Orlando shootings.
Not in My Town, an opera based on the 1998 torture and murder of gay Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard, confronts the question of hate crimes against gay people. Its composer and librettist, Michael W. Ross, said the major scenes being presented Friday will be dedicated to the victims of the shootings, in which 49 patrons of a gay Orlando nightclub were killed by gunman Omar Mateen of Fort Pierce, who was then shot dead by police after a hostage standoff.
“We’re dedicating the performance to the Orlando victims and their families,” said Ross, a Fort Lauderdale resident who teaches at the Pine Crest School. “It’s stunning to me that this (Shepard) happened 18 years ago, and here it is, happening again.”
The opera, which is one act and 13 scenes, recounts the story of Shepard, 21, who was robbed, beaten and tied to a fence near Laramie, Wyo., in October 1998. He died six days later at a Colorado hospital, and while court testimony in the trial of his two assailants indicated that Shepard’s sexual orientation was not the only reason for the attack, major federal hate crimes legislation was named for him and James Byrd Jr., a black man who was murdered in June 1998 by white supremacists who tied him to a truck in Jasper, Texas, and dragged him for miles until he died. 
Friday’s presentation at the Sunshine Cathedral in Fort Lauderdale is being presented under the auspices of Opera Fusion, a fledgling West Palm Beach-based company founded by singers Birgit Fioravante and Dean Peterson. Ross said the company has raised more than $100,000 to fund the premiere of the whole opera, which will be presented Sept. 24 and 25 at Florida Atlantic University as part of International Peace Week.
In addition to about 65 minutes of the opera, the program will include other operatic selections, including music from Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. The Not in My Town excerpts will cover the entire story, so that the audience will see essentially an abridged version of the opera rather than discrete scenes.
“I want to tell the whole story so that the audience will want to come back in the fall,” he said.
Ross, 47, a native of Watertown, N.Y. (pictured at right), studied at the State Universities of New York at Potsdam and Purchase, and at Hunter College, and holds degrees in opera performance and music education. He has worked for Glimmerglass Opera and the New York City Opera, sung with the Palm Beach and Florida Grand opera companies, and in addition to Not in My Town has written operas about Holocaust victim Anne Frank (Yours Truly, Anne), Underground Railroad activist Harriet Tubman (The Line That Divides) and Medusa, the Gorgon of Greek mythology (Head of Medusa).
He points out that Medusa, like the other three opera subjects, is also a victim of oppression.
“Before she was turned into this horrible creature, she was very vain about her beauty, but she was raped by Poseidon. In the story that I tell, I chose to show that she was a rape victim and people in authority would not listen to her,” said Ross, who’s currently working on an opera about another unfortunate female, doomed French queen Marie Antoinette. “My friends say I seem to be obsessed with powerful women who seem to be underdogs.”
Ross, who moved to Wilton Manors in 2004 from New York City, began work on the Shepard opera in 2012, when one of the schools he taught for was holding an LGBT-themed event and was asked to contribute something. That led him to think of the Shepard case, in part because Ross took part in a vigil and march in New York in 1998 during the days after the crime was discovered.
In doing the research for the Shepard story, for which Ross wrote the libretto as is his usual practice, he learned about Shepard’s best friend, Romaine Patterson, who became a prominent LGBT activist in the wake of the killing. She led a group of counterdemonstrators against anti-gay activists from a Kansas church who were weighing in on Shepard’s death, a move whose drama appealed to Ross.
“Once I found all the things I could pull from for this show, I thought ‘There’s no way I can’t write this now,’” he said.
Romaine Patterson.
Patterson, who currently hosts a radio show on Sirius XM, will speak Friday afternoon at FAU’s student union in a panel discussion about the Orlando tragedy before attending the opera that night.
“It is so imperative that works like ‘Not in My Town’ be shared to ensure that people understand the real impact of bias crimes in America,” Patterson said in a prepared statement. “Matthew wanted to live his life helping others. We must all learn from Matthew’s story, and strive to be more kind to one another.”
The initial Shepard project grew into the full-scale opera, which Ross refers to as a “musical drama” rather than an opera because its musical language, particularly in the first half, is often akin to Broadway theater.
“All of my music is very tonal, it’s all very romantic and dramatic,” Ross said. “I grew up composing pop songs when I was young, so I want something that’s going to appeal to the audience, and a lot of the other stuff, in my opinion, doesn’t, because the audiences don’t go.
“There’s more of a venue for this type of thing, which is why Puccini still exists, and Verdi still exists,” he said.
Ryan Townsend.
The opera introduces us to Shepard (sung by Ryan Townsend) and Patterson (Robyn Marie Lamp), who become friends after she breaks up a bullying attack on Shepard. After scenes with Patterson and a fictional girlfriend named Olivia (Ravenna Maer), plus Shepard’s parents, Judy (Sarah Helen-Land) and Dennis (Ardean Landhuis), Shepard fatally encounters his two killers in a stylized, low-light fight scene. After his death and a candlelight vigil, Patterson disrupts an anti-gay demonstration organized by the Rev. Fred Phelps (Enrique Estrada) by bringing in demonstrators wearing giant angel wings that cover the messages on signs held by Phelps’s demonstrators. Following Dennis’s victim statement in court, the opera ends with Patterson addressing the Anti-Defamation League.
Other characters include a rally leader (Edgar Miguel Abreu) and a chorus; Ross has scored it for a small orchestra of 18 players, but says he’s willing and able to beef it up if the need arises. A review of the piano-vocal score shows the work to be straightforwardly tonal and lyrical, with prominent melodies and effective dramatic music.
Robyn Marie Lamp.
While Ross wants to say something important in his opera, he also wants to make sure that entertainment values aren’t pushed to the side.
“I want the audience to have an enjoyable experience, and they will. The things that I choose, and how I write it, is so that they will be engaged, not from this aria, skip a whole section to the next aria. It’s so that they will be engaged the whole way through,” he said. “At the same time, I feel a responsibility to teach them something new, and to make them feel different emotions and think. I really think that’s my goal as a composer.”
Scenes from Not in My Town will be presented at 8 p.m. Friday in the Sunshine Cathedral, 1480 Ninth Ave., Fort Lauderdale. Tickets are $38 and can be purchased at www.operafusion.org; $100 tickets are available that include a 6 p.m. dinner and meet-the-artists reception.
The panel discussion featuring Romaine Patterson is scheduled for 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. Friday at the Student Union on the campus of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.