12 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE NOVEMBER 27, 1998
EVENINGS OUT
'Mozart stud' plays kilted role in tale of required marriage
by Richard M. Berrong
Like Carmen, its first production of the season, Lucia di Lammermoor, Cleveland Opera's second offering, deals with an issue that has concerned many gays. It is the story of an isolated and lonely individual, Lucy, who is pressured by her brother Henry to marry against her will in order to save her family's position in the community.
It is not surprising that the work has long been a favorite of gay men, many of whom could, unfortunately, identify with its putupon heroine. The fact that most of the male performers appear in kilts, since the opera is set in Scotland, may be a more lighthearted
reason for the work's popularity with members of the gay male community.
Cleveland Opera's upcoming production offers an interestingly ironic twist on the opera's central issue. Grant Youngblood, the baritone who will sing the role of Henry, is openly gay. He didn't experience the sort of family pressure to marry that his character exerts on Lucy, since, as he explained to me the other day, he has three straight brothers who are carrying on the family name.
Youngblood has already appeared as Henry Ashton once before, in Eugene, Oregon.
This time, he hopes to bring some new ideas on the role to the production.
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Grant Youngblood
As he sees it, Lucia is the story of a dysfunctional family, a brother and sister who were once loving but have grown apart because Henry, too young to deal with the pressure of running the family after his parents' early death, has become narrowmindedly focused on position and appearances, at the expense of relationships.
Though he is still young, Youngblood's career has taken off in the last several years. He has already appeared with many of the nation's important companies, singing such leading roles as the Toreador in Carmen, Scarpia in Tosca, the Count in Il Trovatore, and Silvio in Pagliacci. He will soon make his debut with the San Francisco Opera, as
Sharpless in Madama Butterfly.
There are still parts he would like to try, however. Among them are Rigoletto, and Athanael, the fanatical preacher in Thais. He also still hopes to appear as the perhaps gay Billy Budd, in Benjamin Britten's opera of that name, and in Dreamkeepers, a new opera dealing with American Indians. (Youngblood is of full Cherokee heritage.) In addition, Youngblood intends to make further concert appearances, particularly in large-scale sacred music. He has already performed in Mendelssohn's Elijah and works by Mozart, Gounod, Fauré, and Schubert, and has similar plans for thefuture.
All this success has not been without a price, however. Youngblood explained to me that he and his partner don't get to see as much of each other as they would like during the opera season, because of all his traveling. His partner is a church music director, and so cannot travel constantly with him. To compensate, they talk on the phone and through e-mail, and have learned to plan vacations that allow them valued time together.
When he first sang in Cleveland, in Marriage of Figaro, the daily paper's music critic Donald Rosenberg described Youngblood as a "Mozart stud."
Members of the northeast Ohio gay community will now have a chance to see more of him-in more ways than one, since he will be wearing a kilt—when Cleveland Opera brings Lucia di Lammermoor, subtitled in English, to the State Theater December 4 and 5 at 8:00 p.m. and December 6 at 2:00 p.m. For tickets call 216-241-6000, in Cleveland, or 800-766-6048.
Richard M. Berrong is a freelance writer living in Kent, Ohio.
AIDS, hate shape Free's music
Continued from previous page
"You have to be my age to write an album like this. The function of AIDS and the way it worked, people who are 21 years old couldn't have had experiences like that. Unless they hung around with people older then themselves. By the time I was 30, I had gone though what's on this record," Free says. "This album is the experience of a generation of gay men. I didn't want it to be a personal thing, I wanted it to be more of a chronicle of history of what we went through."
Free says it is less about the specifics of AIDS and more about the anger that resulted from it.
“AIDS is such a huge problem because the medical establishment did nothing
when it was spreading like wild fire. It still would have been a problem, but not as bad. It wiped out a whole generation of men. It was the discrimination that was there that made AIDS a horrible thing,” the singer explains.
If nothing else, Free hopes his record makes some difference.
"I don't pretend to make the prettiest music," he says. "What I am doing is using my art to wake people up and share with them my experience as an angry gay man with AIDS. I don't understand why more people aren't doing it, but I know I'll never stop." ✓
Jeffrey L. Newman is a freelance writer living in New York. He can be e-mailed at editorjeff@aol.com.
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