Opera

Billy Blythe the opera finally coming home to LR

Billy Blythe: Bill Clinton as a Boy
Billy Blythe: Bill Clinton as a Boy

Young Bill Clinton. What a great subject for an opera, right?

That's what Little Rock honky-tonk singer Bonnie Montgomery and her pal Britt Barber thought when they created Billy Blythe, Bill Clinton as a Boy, a one-act opera that will be performed in its entirety for the first time in Arkansas on Friday and Saturday at Pulaski Technical College's Center for Humanities and Arts in Little Rock.

An Evening of One-Act Operas

Billy Blythe: Bill Clinton as a Boy

The Music Shop

7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, Center for Humanities and Arts, Pulaski Technical College, 3000 W. Scenic Drive, Little Rock

Admission: $65 VIP, $25, $15 students

(501) 420-2742

pulaskitech.simplet…

The production, along with Richard Wargo's one-act opera The Music Shop, is presented by Opera in the Rock.

Written for a piano trio -- piano, cello and violin -- Billy Blythe features 14 characters, and though it was work-shopped here in 2010, it didn't make its full-length debut until April, and that was way up at Opera Ithaca in New York.

Arlene Biebesheimer, artistic director for Opera in the Rock, wanted Billy Blythe back home.

"I kept thinking, why does an Arkansas piece with an Arkansas story written by Arkansas people have to go all the way to New York to get recognized and get a professional performance," she says.

And it features that most recognizable of Arkansans just as his ambitions are about to take hold.

"Clinton is such a human character in our culture," says the versatile Montgomery, who, along with writing operas, has released two full-length albums of folk-tinged country and also won the Outlaw Female award at this year's Ameripolitan Awards. "He's flawed and it was really fun to explore those flaws."

Billy Blythe is a snapshot of a 1959 day in Hot Springs in the life of Clinton, who was born William Jefferson Blythe III in 1946.

"It's all set in one day, but it's a combination of things that happened over a few years in his boyhood," says Montgomery, who grew up in Searcy where her family owned a music store.

The opera's genesis was inspired by a passage from Clinton's 2004 autobiography My Life, where the young Blythe is watching his mother, Virginia, getting ready for a night out.

The image got Montgomery, who has an undergraduate degree in music from Ouachita Baptist University and a master's degree in music from the University of Missouri -- Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance, thinking of an adaptation.

"Opera had been in my mind and I was on that track when I read that account and how he sort of idolized her and romanticized that moment in his mind," she says. "I don't mean romantic in an Oedipal sense, but musical. I could see her sitting in front of that vanity, with her back to the audience and her face in the mirror."

Montgomery, 37, went to work with friend and fellow OBU student Barber, the opera's librettist, to translate that scene into music and words.

"She's an amazing poet," Montgomery says of Barber. "Amazingly brilliant woman. We had so much fun brainstorming and writing."

Along with My Life, the two used Virginia Kelley's autobiography, Leading From the Heart, as inspiration.

Among the performers, all of whom are from central Arkansas, are Little Rock singer Stephanie Smittle singing the role of Virginia; University of Central Arkansas voice student Clay Sanders singing the role of young Blythe; and Robert Holden singing the role of stepfather Roger Clinton.

"Bonnie has written a role that really allows Britt's text to come across and give you an idea of what this woman was about," Smittle says of her role. "And how instrumental she was in forming Bill Clinton's life."

The novelty of an Arkansas-based opera created by Arkansans about Clinton is not lost on Smittle.

"I'm from Arkansas," the Cave Springs native says, "I'm singing the role of an Arkansas woman that was composed by an Arkansas woman. I hope that comes out in the performance."

The opera, along with The Music Shop -- a 1993 comic opera based on the Anton Chekov short story "I Forgot" -- is a chance for Opera in the Rock, after producing The Magic Flute in 2015 and La Boheme earlier this year, to spread its wings a bit, says Biebesheimer.

"We've played it safe in the past with pieces our audiences would recognize. Now we've decided its time to branch out and do something a little modern."

Weekend on 09/15/2016

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