Puritans discouraged the use of musical instruments other than a church bass, but almost 300 years later, a large chorus and a full symphony orchestra debuted a two-hour opera about Puritan Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy. American Jezebel: The Story of Anne Hutchinson in Words and Music by James Kallembach, dramatizes the life and banishment of Anne Hutchinson from the puritanical Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638, placing her alongside some side-narratives of regular Boston folk, both real and fictional. The Harvard Choruses, including the Radcliffe Choral Society, Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, and Harvard Glee Club, collaborated at Sanders Theater on Saturday; Hana J. Cai conducted adroitly and Roxanna Myhrum found effective ways to stage direct in the space.

Kallembach’s tragic retelling of Hutchinson’s trial begins with a young Bostonian, Mary, in distress because her father is wounded and her mother is giving birth. Midwife Anne Hutchinson comes to her rescue, delivers the baby, and invites Mary to come to her house for a spiritual gathering later. Elsewhere, Governor John Winthrop is under pressure from King Charles I to return the Massachusetts colony charter. His wife, Margaret, tries to comfort him. Mary attends Anne’s meetings, but misses a few after falling in love with Tom Creesh. At church, Anne and Winthrop argue about the nature of God’s grace, Anne walks out, and Winthrop is convinced she is a threat to the colony. Sweet Margaret urges Anne to recant her strong views while acknowledging that she privately supports her, but Anne won’t be swayed. Indicted by the Great and General Court of Massachusetts, with Winthrop accusing her of sowing discord, Anne maintains that she has not broken any laws. Meanwhile, Mary is pregnant and begs Tom to run away with her, but he is anxious that his deserting the fight against the Pequot tribe will catch up to him, and he leaves her. In the final moments of the opera, Mary hurls herself into the sea in despair and Anne is sentenced to banishment from the colony.

Aside from Kallembach’s choice to use the medium of opera to bring a Puritan drama to life, the setting at Harvard University gave the piece a cheeky irony, even before the orchestra began to tune. Anne Hutchinson’s threatening religious dissidence, and her compelling verbal self-defense in court, are credited as one of the primary factors that led to Harvard University’s founding. Some have even gone as far as calling her the “midwife of Harvard College.” The Massachusetts ministers couldn’t be seen to have a woman outwit them in spiritual discourse, so they set out to create a place to educate a new generation of (male) religious leaders. As conductor Cai raised her baton, it was not lost on me that there were two statues in the theatre of significant Harvard men, James Otis and Josiah Quincy, staring down at Hutchinson’s story and ultimate downfall; poor Anne can’t catch a break from men of influence’s gaze, even in her own opera. (She does have her own statue just outside the Massachusetts State House off of Beacon Street, and its installation in the 1920s caused quite a controversial stir, 300 years after her death)

The ensembles in the choruses came together with excellent blend, though their diction was inconsistent. A high point came in a tender folk song in the second act, “Green grow the laurels.” Despite some entrance and lyric hesitations, the principal cast of five delivered powerful vocal performances. Sarah Joyce Cooper’s rich intensity suited Anne; her shining moment arrived when she literally let her hair down for her final aria, “Unadorned.” Her unfettered voice and comfort in her own home felt radical, intimate, and glorious. Brava. Kristen Watson as Mary showed an impressive range with her innocent, bell-like timbre that began pleasantly in love and ended utterly agonizing as she throws herself to the sea (“Death, can you betray me?” raised goosebumps in the best way). Elisabeth Marshall as Margaret sounded warm and grounded; every time John Winthrop interrupted her, I wanted to rush up there to her rescue. Sumner Thompson as John Winthrop performed with conviction; his “City on a Hill” aria every bit embodied the Puritan dream. And his faceoff with Cooper’s Anne at the end of act one, “The Indictment,” felt especially energizing. Gene Stenger as Tom Creesh (after briefly portraying Henry Vale in the first act) broke hearts with his sweet tenor and fickle commitments to Mary.

Kallembach’s score is gorgeous and often haunting. The percussion in particular stood out, often delivering an epic undercurrent of timpani for the nimble strings and woodwinds one moment, and a crackling and brutal clinking of bells the next, echoing almost chain-like, as tensions rose on stage. Cai conducted the nearly 160-person combined orchestra and chorus with nuance and purposefulness. The handful of moments when she coaxed the brass section out of the ensemble sizzled brilliantly. Allowing Anne to express dazzling wit, the lyrics snuck in hints of her approachability in more intimate exchanges, “All the sermons in Boston cannot make a baby.” Overall, Kallembach’s romantic approach to this sometimes stiff and aloof Puritan history grants these characters color and air to breathe deeply, inviting audiences to lean in and get caught up in the urgency of the action on stage.

Thanks to Myhrum’s stage direction, the cast made efficient use of the limited stage space; she often sent performers running through the aisles or placed them off the lip of the stage, almost breaking the fourth wall. The scene of wigged ministers (a tight, stirring “Conference of the ministers” quartet) glaring down from the stage at Anne on the floor, emphasizing the unequal power dynamics during that portion of the trial, very much got our attention. Brooke Stanton designed spot-on costumes which looked fabulous in Jeff Adelberg’s lighting. Together, their work evoked the style of George Henry Boughton’s painting, “Pilgrims going to church.” It was unfortunate the surtitles occasionally got out of sync or skipped entirely.

From start to finish, it’s clear that while the title of the production is “American Jezebel,” the author does not take sides. He neither places Anne on a pedestal, nor does he portray Winthrop as a villain. (Kallembach confirms this in his remarks in an in-depth virtual discussion about the opera moderated by Harvard’s Director of Choral Activities, Andrew Clark, and featuring composer James Kallembach, historian Eve LaPlante (author of American Jezebel), and Puritan scholar Francis J. Bremer (One Small Candle, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father). Although the stakes are so high for these characters on stage, with no person or thing to blame for Anne and Mary’s tragic ends, we are left feeling a muted sadness instead of being moved to passionate tears. If we are meant to take away that society needs both Anne’s free-thinking and Winthrop’s reverence for collective duty, there are not enough wayfinding signs to get there.

One final storytelling choice raised more questions than it answered. Kallembach placed Mary’s death and Anne’s banishment side-by-side both musically and physically, with Mary climbing onto a bench between Winthrop and Anne. The duet made a gorgeous impression (Cooper and Watson’s lyrical chemistry was like a winter breeze, chilly and invigorating), but a lingering question of “Why?” weakened the final, striking tableau. Is Mary’s trajectory meant to echo Anne’s, or foil it? Why place these women together, in both the lyrics and on stage, at that climactic moment? After all the soaring melodies and lyrical drama, the story ended too abruptly with this question thick in the air, leaving me hungry for an epilogue. Winthrop and the chorus had the final word, not Anne. So, while American Jezebel did not explicitly take sides, it did leave Anne standing judged, alone, and silent as the lights went down.

See related interview HERE

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Pictures by Kathy Wittman above and below