MEDFORD, Mass. – When Tufts music student Abigail Al-Doory sought operatic inspiration, she looked not to the classics like Wagner’s “Ring” cycle but to the Olympic rings, where themes like power, envy and greed are also in plentiful supply.
In “Tonya and Nancy: The Opera,” Al-Doory provides 18 movements on the scandal that turned the once-dainty sport of figure skating into a soap opera of whacking, wailing and jail. Scheduled for two performances night, the verismo production portrays the skaters not as rivals but more as a pair, singing for the audience’s sympathy as the tawdry affair unfolds.
“I think they had a lot in common, which is what we wanted to draw out in the opera,” said Al-Doory, who composed the music to complete her masters degree. “They both figured out they had to reclaim their identities. It’s a note of hope.”
More Peggy Fleming than Renee Fleming, “Tonya and Nancy” follows the lines of “Jerry Springer – The Opera,” a London hit based on the equally lowbrow world of daytime talk TV. Al-Doory takes the well-known rivalry between the skaters and recasts it as one in which they both struggle to overcome personal troubles and public perception.
“We, as a society, allowed this to happen to two young girls. They’re building up their entire lives for this moment. And who are they after that?” Al-Doory said. “It can’t help being absurd and funny because of the situation. But it’s serious.”
Even so, she’ll have a hard time selling a ticket to Kerrigan, who said Monday she’d been aware of the production but wasn’t planning to attend.
“I lived it,” the skater said. “What do I need to watch it for?”
She’ll miss Margaret Hunter (Nancy) and Kristen Sergeant (Tonya) open with dueling news conferences before the action flashes back to the knee-whacking and follows them through the Olympic skateoff to their futures. Nancy becomes a wife and mother; Tonya an ex-wife and one tough mother.
Banned from skating, Harding joins the Faustian freak show that is women’s boxing.
“The difference is you have to have the balls to punch the other girl in the face,” Harding sings. “The difference is you don’t get in trouble for hitting her.”
That this is “Tonya and Nancy,” and not the other way around, is no accident. Only in opera – or its schlockier, soapier offspring – would a convicted Olympic also-ran get top billing over a squeaky-clean silver medalist.
“She is the more fascinating character. And, also, it sounds better to me,” librettist Elizabeth Searle said at rehearsal last weekend. “I don’t think there’s any way to look at Tonya’s history and not feel some degree of sympathy. As a writer, I feel huge sympathy for her.
“And I love her as a character.”
Harding never leaves the stage during the 40-minute production. Breaking from the made-for-TV mold, though, she is not put on display for mockery or scorn.
The opera is a brutal expose on Harding’s home life, showing her as a victim of maternal and spousal abuse. You see her breakdown, perhaps contrived, as she warbles, “The lace is broke!” But you also see her face contort into real fear when her duet with husband Jeff Gillooly twists into a wife-beating tango.
“Yes, I’d always rather play the villain,” said Sergeant, whose only skating experience came in childhood hockey. “Wouldn’t everyone?”
Kerrigan also comes away tarnished. But every “Why me?” has an answer of “Why her?”
Nancy sings, “My mom is legally blind.” Tonya: “My mom is legally nuts.”
The casting makes the point, too: Jennifer Hazel plays both skaters’ mothers, taking the same cartoonish hairbrush she used to stroke Nancy’s brunette locks and using it to beat Harding for missing the medal stand at the Olympics.
But Nancy is no more satisfied.
“Silver?” she repeats joylessly after finishing second.
“We’re definitely sympathetic to both. I’m sure we’re also unsympathetic to both,” Al-Doory said. “It’s a pretty bald look at both of them based on headlines and stuff they said in real life.”
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