In the opening scene of Complications in Sue, a new commission by Opera Philadelphia beginning its four-night run this evening, at the city’s Academy of Music, four solemn figures push a vintage black baby carriage across the stage. Long shadows loom; the vocalists portend a “world that’s full of wonder, a world that’s full of woe.” As far as birth stories go, this vignette seems to strike an Edward Gorey-esque mood, with the librettist Michael R. Jackson—a 2020 Pulitzer winner for his musical A Strange Loop—casting Death in the unlikely role of the welcome committee.
But then, a voice chirps up from a nearby aisle. “Hi! It’s my birthday!” says the cabaret legend Justin Vivian Bond, swanning through the audience in an iridescent feathered sheath and matching headpiece designed by Jonathan Anderson. A star is born—and Sue’s life, complicated as advertised, is about to unfold.
This, if not already clear, isn’t your typical opera. For that, we have Anthony Roth Costanzo to thank. When the celebrated countertenor took over as the general director and president of Opera Philadelphia in June 2024, he had to make haste on planning the company’s 50th-anniversary season. He asked Bond, his collaborator on the 2021 show Only an Octave Apart, if she had any ideas, and she proffered an already-baked title. (“Complications in Sue” was a seedlet of a concept she’d discussed with her friend Tilda Swinton, whose encouragement was swift: “‘Develop it, darling,’” Bond recounts.) Jackson, meanwhile, had separately floated his interest in working on a libretto, and Costanzo made the match.
With only a year-long runway—too short to expect a composer to take on a full-length project—the plan was to divide the opera into 10 parts, each assigned to a different composer. “It would be a kind of musical buffet,” says Jackson, “with Viv as our leitmotif.”
The result is “like one of those movies from the ’70s that has every star in it,” says Bond of the eclectic creative team. In the co-directors’ chairs are Raja Feather Kelly (a longtime Jackson collaborator) and Zack Winokur (Octave). Anderson, fresh off presenting his debut couture collection for Dior, has masterminded a suite of costumes for the leading lady, whom he’s known since college, Bond says. The roster of composers includes the Grammy-nominated Missy Mazzoli, the jazz musician Cécile McLorin Salvant, and Nico Muhly, whose prolific output crisscrosses from the Metropolitan Opera to Sufjan Stevens.
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