Grammy Award-winning mariachi band Mariachi los Camperos (photo by Sarah Shatz for New York City Opera)
The Lyric Opera of Kansas City presents “Cruzar la Cara de la Luna” (To Cross the Face of the Moon), a multigenerational story about family, longing, displacement and home.
“The whole piece is about asking the question ‘where is home?’” said Leonard Foglia, librettist and director. “And that’s different for everybody.”
“Cruzar” was the first ever mariachi opera, premiering in 2010 (coinciding with anniversaries for the 1810 Mexican War of Independence and the 1910 Mexican Revolution).
It tells the story of Laurentino, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico decades before, now on his deathbed, as he struggles with the secrets and regrets of his past, reconciling the family he left behind and the family he created in the United States.
Foglia collaborated with legendary mariachi bandleader José “Pepe” Martínez, music director for Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán. This was the first opera either had created, with Martinez as composer and Foglia as librettist. They later collaborated on a second opera, “El Pasado Nunca Se Termina,” in 2015. Martínez died in 2016.
“I come from the theater and didn’t start my life in the opera world,” said Foglia. “But the idea of experimenting or doing something new and original is the whole reason I went into the theater.”
The idea of a mariachi-driven opera was initiated by then-general director of Houston Grand Opera Anthony Freud, who brought together Foglia and Martínez. “(Pepe) said to me, ‘I write songs. I don’t know how to write an opera.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about that. You just do what you do and I’ll take care of the rest.’ And he just looked at me and went, ‘Okay,’” said Foglia.
The resulting work is an attractive pairing of musical genres, with an emotional and
heartrending story that is as timely now as it was a decade and a half ago. And it’s proven its resonance with successful performances across the country and in Europe.
It’s not just mariachi-style music, in the way some operas will invoke certain sensibilities in an otherwise Western European style, but authentic mariachi performance. Originally featuring Mariachi Vargas, the band is onstage, playing and singing, decked out in traditional garb, a part of the action, not just accompanying it. In this Lyric Opera production, Los Angeles-based, Grammy Award-winning Mariachi Los Camperos performs onstage. The group first performed the opera at New York City Opera in 2018 and has performed it many times since.
“Cruzar,” which was commissioned by Houston Grand Opera, shifts between modern-day Texas and 1960s-era Mexico, and is performed in both Spanish and English, presented with Spanish and English subtitles.
The opera was originally created with the Latino community in Houston in mind. “I wanted it to be something that would have meaning for them, but I also want it to be universal,” said Foglia. (Houston Grand Opera has since presented the opera in 2013 and 2018.) Kansas City, too, has a strong Hispanic community; immigration from Mexico began in the 1830s with the development of the Santa Fe Trail and continued into the 1900s and through to the present.
“I wanted to explore the notion, since we are a land of immigrants, where is home?” Foglia said. “Is home the place you’re born? Is home the place you grew up? Is home the place where you get married? Is home the place where your children grew up? Where is home?”
And it’s not just people coming from other countries and cultures who struggle with this feeling. “We’re all such a peripatetic group now too,” said Foglia, who grew up in Boston, but has lived in New York and Mexico and travels the world for his work. “We all move from one state to another, or one city to another. We all move around a lot. And that sense of home is lost.”
Foglia is himself a child of an immigrant. In preparing this work, Foglia not only researched immigration and interviewed Mexican American immigrants, but he also thought back to his own family’s experience and the longing his father had for the country they left behind. While the story is fictional and involves fictional characters, it draws from real experiences.
“When my sister came to see it for the first time, she recognized right away little elements of our father there,” said Foglia.
Many of the cast, most of whom are Mexican American, are from the original production and have performed the work around the country and include both opera-trained and mariachi-trained voices. Octavio Moreno (Laurentino), Cecilia Duarte (Renata, his wife), Vanessa Alonzo (Lupita, Renata’s friend) and Miguel de Aranda (Chucho, Lupita’s husband) were all in the original cast, while Federico de Michelis (Mark, Laurentino’s American-born son) and Daniel Montenegro (Rafael, Laurentino’s eldest son) have performed the opera in previous productions. Bethany Jelinek (Diana, Laurentino’s granddaughter) is a Lyric Opera resident artist, making her debut in the role.
It’s not just a story about this longing for home, but also a search for heritage.
“It’s the granddaughter in the story who wants to find out about what happened in the past, probably something that never occurred to her before in her life,” said Foglia. “She just went about her life and all of a sudden, her grandfather is beginning to talk about something in the past that they were unaware of. She’s the one that wants to go in exploration of it, realizing that not only does she want to find out the answers for him, but all of a sudden, realizes this is her heritage, too.”
Lyric Opera of Kansas City presents “Cruzar la Cara de la Luna” March 7-9, at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. For more information visit kcopera.org.
