Although Tulsa, Oklahoma, is certainly not on many people’s shortlist of America’s finest centers of cultural activity, as we learn in The Sound of Identity, it’s the smallest American city to have the cultural trifecta of a ballet company, a symphony orchestra, and an opera company.
But this documentary shines its spotlight on Tulsa’s opera, which in its own way is taking a declining art form (“opera has been dying for 400 years” says one New York Times journalist) and giving it a fresh new edge: their conductor/composer Thomas Picker has made the bold move to cast pathbreaking baritone trans opera singer Lucia Lucas as the lead in their production of Don Giovanni, which would be the first time a transgender woman had ever been cast for the part (but especially interesting considering the gender-bending roleplay of Giovanni himself).
The first two-thirds or so of the film gets you acquainted with the production team behind the Tulsa Opera as well as extensive interviews with Lucas herself. It’s all leading, however, to the big night where Lucas will make her all-important first performance. Will it be accepted—or will it be too radical for the art patrons of Oklahoma’s second city?
Although the forward momentum of the film is occasionally lost in the thick of too many interviews with too many competing talking heads, you get a lot of background information about the potentially game-changing nature of this production and the riskiness involved (at one point Picker admits that if his vision of Giovanni isn’t accepted, he may well have to resign).
We learn the financial logistics of such an ambitious production like this one: it costs half a million dollars, yet ticket prices have to stay low to entice an already dwindling audience for opera to fill seats. And of course, we get Lucas’s own life story and her often difficult route to operatic stardom.
Ultimately, director James Kicklighter’s handling of his subject matter here is enlightened and even-handed: we get an intimate look at the very real challenges and uncertainties that Picker and his crew face—they’re all too conscious of the fact that if this production with Lucas isn’t handled with the utmost care, it could be seen as an exploitative publicity stunt done just to revive the opera’s fortunes. But whatever the case, the talent on display here—most notably Lucas’s—transcend conventional notions about traditional gender operatic roles and help re-situate opera, at long last, into a forward-looking art form. Recommended.