Review: THIS LITTLE LIGHT OF MINE at Santa Fe Opera At Lensic Performing Arts Center

This Little Light of Mine, Santa Fe Opera's Opera for All Voices

Saturday, October 29, Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe, NM

It's amazing - every time there is a movie, play or musical about civil rights in the United States, it's alarming how the more things change, the more they stay the same. Santa Fe Opera's production, This Little Light of Mine, is a prime example. The opera, with music by Chandler Carter and Libretto by Diana Solomon-Glover, focuses on the real life story of Fannie Lou Hamer, a Black woman born and raised in Mississippi who becomes a beacon and a leader for securing the right to vote for Black Americans.

The production takes place between 1923 and 1977, and jumps back and forth across time to show how the fight for equality, while progressing, does so at a snail's pace. Hamer, played and sung powerfully by Nicole Joy Mitchell, learns of her right to vote in her 40s, while working as a sharecropper for a plantation owner. She goes to a meeting of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced Snick) and is empowered to register to vote.

The path to registration is paved with brutality and difficulty - Mississippi authorities defied Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in their push for desegregation and civil rights - intimidating, beating and arresting Black people for merely attempting to register. Hamer persists, even after she has learned that in addition to white America's attempt to silence Black voters, they also sterilized her and thousands of other Black women. These Jim Crow-era injustices propel Hamer and add fire to her mission, leading her all the way to the Democratic National Committee to appeal the seating of an all-white Mississippi delegation at the National Convention in 1964.

The liquidity of time in the production is important, because it shows that for every step forward, there were many steps back. Each time a setback occurs, Hamer leads the most adept Ensemble in a spiritual, such as This Little Light of Mine.

Strong performances from Kearstin Piper Brown, who plays Dorothy Jean Hamer, as well as many other characters, mostly law enforcement/authority figures. Heather Hill as June Johnson, the SNCC worker who first engages Fannie Lou in activism, is compelling and has wonderful tone.

The only scene that this production was lacking was a scene of Fannie Lou actually VOTING - her fight was so long and hard, it would have been rewarding to the audience to see that her fight actually came to fruition in getting to vote. Perhaps the exclusion of that scene shows that the fight is never over, as witnessed by today's politics.

Opera for All Voices (OFAV) is committed to co-commissioning and co-producing new operatic works for audiences of all ages that bear the same artistic integrity and depth of storytelling as the festival season. There is additionally a commitment to social impact and the representation of diverse voices through the development of these new and important works.

OFAV was guided by a consortium of opera companies led by the Santa Fe Opera and included Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Minnesota Opera, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, San Francisco Opera, Sarasota Opera, and Seattle Opera.

Projects selected through the invitational move through the development process. Each receives a workshop, an opportunity to premiere the opera at one of the partner companies listed above, as well as the opportunity for subsequent performances at other partner companies.

Operas like This Little Light of Mine are critical for the continuance of opera as an art form. It would behoove Santa Fe Opera to think ahead about including this piece in its regular festival season - it's critical to not only trot out the classics but to integrate new opera to attract a more diverse and younger audience. Santa Fe Opera has always been a trailblazer in this arena, with each season featuring a World Premiere or new opera - having seen many of these past productions, I can say that This Little Light of Mine deserves a place on Santa Fe Opera's main stage.