Dr. Clifford (Kip) Cranna
Dr. Clifford (Kip) Cranna
SESSION #5: Dead Man Walking
FEATURING: Dr. Clifford (Kip) Cranna, Dramaturg Emeritus, then Director of Music Administration (2000)
Interview conducted by: Jeffery McMillan, Public Relations Director, on 06/27/2025
(transcript read time ~ 14 minutes)
KIP CRANNA [KC]: I’m Kip Cranna. I’m called Dramaturg Emeritus now at San Francisco Opera. During the period that Dead Man Walking premiered, I was called Director of Music Administration, among other things working on commissioners for new operas.
JEFF MCMILLAN [JM]: Great, and this is Jeff McMillan, Public Relations Director for San Francisco Opera. Thank you, Kip, for coming in to chat about your perspective on Dead Man Walking. And you mentioned it in your title from that time, seeing new commissions through to opening night. Could you tell me before Dead Man Walking what kind of new commissions you worked on?
KC: There were a few before Dead Man Walking, although the bulk of having lots of commissions almost every year came a bit later.
Lotfi [Mansouri, general director 1988-2001], when he took over, pulled me aside almost immediately and said, “Kip, I want to do three things: I want to commission an opera based on Dangerous Liaisons,” the famous novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, which had, of course, been made into two different films, “and I want to commission an opera based on Streetcar Named Desire, and I want to commission an opera with a libretto by Terrence McNally,” of course by then was renowned as a playwright, and famously interested in opera, as his play Master Class demonstrates, along with others, like The Lisbon Traviata, and so forth.
And so we set about to do that, and we commissioned Conrad Susa, who at that time taught composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, with a librettist named Philip Littell, who adopted that French epistolary novel [Dangerous Liaisons]into an opera, which we premiered in 1994. And then we got to work on Streetcar Named Desire, and that was a bit tricky because we had to get the rights to the play, and we had to think a lot about who the composer should be. And Lotfi’s not here to contradict me anymore; I will take credit for actually (laughter) coming up with the idea of André Previn at one point.
In those days, the way you checked out contemporary composers was that their agent sent you cassette tapes. Do you remember cassette tapes?
JM: Oh, yeah.
KC: And we would listen to those. And I had contacted various agents of composers, and they sent us all kinds of tapes, and we listened. Lotfi wasn’t intrigued with any of them. One morning, I was driving to work, listening to classical radio, and I heard a composition by André Previn, and I thought, that’s a sound that I’m thinking would be right for a piece like Streetcar Named Desire, and I floated that. And Lotfi contacted André, who said no originally, although he later said he said yes right away, but that’s not actually true. (laughter) He said no, and then he called back, having thought about it, and said, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” And then having his name attached to the project made it much easier to get the rights to the play. Streetcar premiered in 1998.
So by that point, Lotfi had his eye on this young guy working in our public relations department named Jake Heggie, who had made quite a name for himself writing songs, and many artists had been attracted to his songs, and had performed them. He’d written songs for specific artists. He’d recorded them. He’d won an award for his songwriting. And at that point, Lotfi, thinking about a piece for the Millennium, maybe thought a new voice would be the right person to do a world premiere, celebrating the Millennium, and he approached Jake about that. And he thought, this is the point at which I can get Terrence McNally involved. He sent Jake to New York to meet with Terrence.
Lotfi’s idea, he really had this dream of a piece for the Millennium that was sort of on the theme of, as the French say, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” -- the more things change, the more they stay the same. There was a French film I’m forgetting now -- I should have looked this up before coming to talk to you about who directed the film, but it’s called Les Belles de nuit, The Beauties of the Night. And the hero in it daydreams about having wonderful romantic adventures in various periods in history. I think there are three different historical periods in the movie. And in each period, people are nostalgic for an earlier time. That’s when this plus ça change thing comes in: nostalgia is prevalent always, and in any era, historically, people always think that things were better before. Terrence hated that idea. (laughter) He was not interested in anything historical at all. He really wanted to deal with something more contemporary. Jake has often told the story about how Terrence gave him a list of, I think, ten possible titles, starting with Dead Man Walking, and Jake immediately fixed on that, thinking he didn’t really need to hear any more. But that’s how we got to commission Dead Man Walking.
JM: Wow. What was your relationship like with Jake before the commissioning of him for this opera came up? I mean, had you worked with him in the PR department?
KC: As Director of Music Administration, I did have quite a lot of interaction with the PR department, and with Jake. I wasn’t very familiar with his songwriting at that point. I was aware that he was doing this. Jake tells this story about the Dangerous Liaison period, which was where we were getting that piece written, and it was very far behind schedule -- it’s a long story which I won’t bore you with -- but Jake tells the story about calling me up to see if he could arrange an interview with the composer, Conrad Susa. And I said, “First, we got to get this blankety-blank, blankety-blank opera written, God damn it!” (laughter) So I was not exactly... Jake has forgiven me for that, but those were often the kinds of interactions I might have, obviously certainly trying to facilitate as much as possible publicity about the pieces we were doing. That’s one interaction with Jake that I specifically remember.
And then once it was decided that the commission would happen, Lotfi thought the thing to do would be to put him on staff as a composer in residence, so actually I negotiated with Jake a contract whereby he would no longer be an employee of the PR department, but would be a composer in residence, working on this opera.
JM: All right. And so the Conrad Susa opera was slow in gestation. What was the process like with Dead Man Walking? Did it move along, hitting all the deadlines that the Company had set for it, or what was the process like with Jake and Terrence?
KC: Oh, with Dead Man, it was a very smooth process, really. Jake was very conscientious and good about getting things in on time. One of the sort of mundane parts of supervising a commissioning is exactly that process of making sure things happen on time, that people get paid when it’s time for something to be paid, and that when the libretto is finished that people get to see it; when parts of the opera are finished that the singers get them; and so forth. So I was very much involved in that, and I don’t recall any difficulties there.
One of the interesting things about it is that Jake to this day writes with a pencil and paper. He’s not one of these composers who sits at a computer keyboard and does it electronically. And so he had a copyist, that I had worked with directly, who he would send this draft of his manuscript to the copyist, who would then get it to me, and it was a question then of, of course, Jake having to proofread it, and then getting it out to the various people involved, singers especially.
We workshopped it in the summer of 1999, and that was a fascinating process. It was up to me to organize that logistically, although our Artistic Department arranged the singers for it. And quite a few of the singers who were in that workshop would ultimately create the roles that would be premiered the following year. And it was clear then that we had a pretty interesting piece to work with, even with a piano workshop where people are basically learning their roles, just sort of hashing through things. It was obvious that this was going to be a piece of some significance.
JM: And where did the workshop take place? Was it in the chorus room upstairs, or...?
KC: We have a rehearsal studio named Zellerbach B. There’s Zellerbach Rehearsal Hall, which is a wing attached to Davies Symphony Hall, created specifically for opera rehearsals, and there’s a big stage and orchestra pit, rehearsal area upstairs called Zellerbach A, and then in the basement there’s a smaller studio called Zellerbach B. I remember very well being down there to see all this unfold.
There was a documentary being made at this time called And Then One Night, which is a line from the opera. And so there were film crews there, filming the workshop at this point. So there was a lot of attention, media-wise, being paid to this piece, just as it was being developed.
JM: Now, was that totally different from all the other commissions that had come along, this media attention, even for the workshop before this piece had maybe even been finished or finalized, and still coming up the pike, and people were already paying attention?
KC: What I think was unusual about the attention being given was the fact that it was an unknown composer, but, of course, it was an extremely well-known subject -- and Susan Sarandon had won an Oscar for playing Sister Helen in the film -- and, of course, an extremely well-known librettist -- Terrence McNally would probably, in the theatrical world, be a name recognition figure that you couldn’t surpass. So that was a little unusual.
It was a time, in the ’90s, where there was a lot of TV stuff happening with opera, so Dangerous Liaisons was televised, as was Streetcar Named Desire. In fact, Streetcar was issued on a DVD, still available. So it wasn’t so unusual to have that kind of attention, but at this early stage, for a piece by an unknown composer, that was a little bit out of the ordinary. Looking back, one of the great regrets, of course, is that we made a commercial recording of the world premiere performances of Dead Man Walking, audio recording, on CD, but we didn’t do a commercial video, and there still isn’t one, although it has been videoed. There was a version done by Spanish TV, from a production in Madrid, that was briefly on YouTube -- I remember seeing it there -- but it was quickly taken down in anticipation of the Metropolitan Opera’s performing the piece in 2023, and they did it in the cinema. But yes, that is one regret. There are quite a few clips from the world premiere performance here in the documentary, And Then One Night, but we didn’t get a usable commercial version of the whole thing.
JM: In your interviews with folks who are associated with the premiere, you’ve asked each of them if they had a sense that it was going to be a flop or if it was going to be a hit. What was the point when you felt this was really different? Was it the workshop, or somewhere along in the process leading up to the workshop, or after?
KC: I was nervous all along. Even though I thought the piece was extremely effective, I wasn’t sure. Part of the problem was that, from my perspective as a bureaucrat, whose job was it to get the damn show on, I was acutely aware of the production difficulties that we had gone through. In those days, we only did one piano dress rehearsal. That is the point where all the visual elements come together -- the scenery, the costumes, the lighting -- onstage, with piano accompaniment. Since then, of course, we’ve changed rehearsal practices, and we’ll typically do what’s called a piano tech, which is sort of a preliminary to that, and then the piano dress rehearsal, before getting into our rehearsals with the orchestra, with the stage and the orchestra, I should say.
The piano dress was a bit of a disaster, because the director, Joe Mantello, who I think was doing a wonderful job directing this piece and bringing out fascinating characterizations in his artists, was simply not used to the strictures that we have here in the world of opera. We just don’t have the time to burn that you do on Broadway, where you do lots of rehearsals, and then you have maybe two weeks of try-outs, (laughs) maybe in Boston or something, before opening on Broadway.
As Terrence McNally later said, “You just threw that piece on the stage, didn’t you?” Which is true, yes. We just didn’t have much time to devote to lots of extra rehearsal. So it was clear, Joe was stopping all the time in the piano dress rehearsal to fix minor things, like, “Would you stand on that second step up, rather than the third step?”, or, “Let’s try that entrance again and see if we can get the follow spot on you a little sooner,” all things like that. And finally, I could see that there was no possibility we were going to finish this opera. I don’t believe we got to the second act at all, maybe part of it. But I said to Joe during a pause, “Joe, you’ve got to skip things. You’ve got to... When there’s a problem like the things you’ve been stopping for, don’t stop; just make a note. Tell your assistant, take note about that, we’ll deal with it later. And if there’s, like, a set piece where nothing really happens except the singing, you’ve got to skip it. Otherwise, (laughs) we are not going to finish.”
So, for me, it was stressissimo. (laughter) After that night, I thought, oh, Jesus, are we going to have a flop or not? And so the rest of the rehearsing took place with the orchestra, and seeing it come together was very gratifying. But because of this, from my point of view -- I was too deep in the weeds with the practicalities of making it happen -- I couldn’t really see beyond that to... So on opening night, I was very nervous, I have to say.
JM: (laughs) Was Jake Heggie still writing music, and Terrence still making changes to the text, or were those things pretty in place? It was really the staging of the opera that was causing all the stress?
KC: I don’t recall any last-minute musical changes. It would have fallen to me to make sure that everyone gets to know if there... Typically, what would be happening in that stage in a world premiere would be cuts, when I decide, you know, these two bars are going to go, or we need two more bars of transition music there to get the scenery changed. (laughs) And I would be the one to make sure that everyone got the word about that. And I don’t recall any of that sort of thing.
There were changes after the workshop, and I wrote about this in the program notes for the Opera Guild’s preview booklet for that season. In the workshop, the characterization of Sister Helen was a little more similar to the characterization of Susan Sarandon in the film than to the real Sister Helen, who is a woman of tremendous courage and conviction and determination, and I would say not a lot of self-doubt. The character that Susan Sarandon portrayed is a woman full of self-doubt, and fears, and reticence, and insecurity. And a little bit of that came across, particularly in the first act of the opera. And after the workshop, I think Terrence and Jake -- probably primarily Terrence -- decided that they needed to reinforce Sister Helen’s character, and make her a little more like the real Helen, a little less lacking in conviction and self-confidence. We do get some of her hesitancy and self-doubt in her famous aria, “This Journey, This Journey to Christ.” She’s driving to Angola State Prison for her first in-person meeting with this guy that she’s been a pen pal with for a while, and in her aria, which Terrence has so brilliantly outlined, we see her emotional transition: “This journey to my God, to my Jesus, to this man, to myself. What am I getting myself into? What will this be like?” And then, in the middle of it -- again, I think this is a brilliant idea -- to give it that two-part structure that we’re so familiar with from the bel canto, sort of a slow thing and then a concluding fast thing. There’s a little interlude where she’s stopped for speeding by a traffic cop, and after that then she launches into a vocalization of her own determination and her calling on her faith, really, to sustain her in the enterprise she’s about to undertake.
JM: So you have such experience with the bel canto rep, and all of the operatic rep. That observation, that was great, about the aria, you know, going to the prison being interrupted and then coming back with the fast... Were you noticing these kinds of musical aspects of Jake’s score that were tying it in with the tradition, or did this piece seem like something totally different, or what were your overall impressions as it came together?
KC: I was certainly noticing Jake’s heritage, which he has talked about often, the influences on him, primarily Bernstein, Britten, and Sondheim, and so traces of that. But I was already noticing the way he works with the orchestra, and there’s a distinctive Jake Heggie sound that now, having worked with Jake on quite a number of operas (laughs) in the ensuing operas, there’s a sound that I detect. And there is a particular way of motific development that is what I was focusing on when I was hearing it. For example, at the very beginning, there is a little quintuplet figure, a little da-da-dee-da-da, da-da-dee-da-da, da-da-dee-da-da, which we learn eventually is associated with the horrible crime that the opera starts with, the brutal killing of these two teenagers who are on a date.
Then, of course, there is the hymn that Jake has written for Sister Helen, which sounds like it came right out of the African American spiritual tradition, pentatonic except for a little blue note at the end: (singing) “He will gather us around, all around.” (speaking) And little motifs of that sneak into the orchestra here and there.
There’s a theme associated with the prisoner, Joseph De Rocher, (singing) “Nine five two eight one, Joseph De Rocher, nine five two eight one.” (speaking) That’s his prison number. And little bits of that come into the orchestra at various points.
And there’s the theme associated with Sister Helen’s journey -- (singing) “This journey, this journey to God,” (speaking) however that goes -- bits of that weave into the orchestral texture, and sometimes these things combine, rather like in a Wagnerian fashion. And sometimes they’re speeded up, or altered so that you barely recognize them, but I was listening intently enough to think, oh, that’s that. (laughs) So, in Jake’s operas, that has always been a factor that I have focused in on. It’s true with Moby-Dick, too. There are very, very precise, and very determinate motifs in Moby-Dick that are manipulated in that way. It’s a part of Jake’s style.
JM: Let’s go back to opening night, and the final dress rehearsal’s behind you; all the things have been figured out that could be figured out. Walk us through opening night for this world premiere opera that you had helped shepherd along through the paces to that moment.
KC: [00:25:45] Well, there’s always a tremendous excitement about opening nights of a new piece, and fingers crossed. Of course, as Jake has famously said, there’s the one element that’s missing from an opera until opening night, which is the audience. You have everything else -- you’ve got the score; you’ve got the singers; you’ve got the orchestra and the conductor; you’ve got the production, the staging, the scenery -- but the one element that you haven’t added in yet is the audience, and it’s always unpredictable. It’s always a bit of a guessing game, what’s going to happen. But it was pretty clear, by getting into, really, the second scene of the opera, that something fairly special was going on.
We begin with this brutal murder, and it’s pretty intense. You know, it’s a tough scene to watch. And then, bam, we’re hit with the really upbeat scene where Sister Helen is teaching her little hymn to the kids in the school that the nuns run, and this turns into almost like a Broadway number, with the kids all joining in, and having great fun as they learn this upbeat hymn, the way it’s orchestrated and developed. So it was clear that this was kind of a dramatic masterstroke, to break that tension with something so engaging, and then leading right into that to Sister Helen sort of confiding in her friend, Sister Rose, about, “This guy has written to me and wants me to come and see him,” and what that will be like, and so forth.
There’s that feeling in an audience, that kind of electricity, that chemistry, (laughs) hard to describe, but it was there, definitely. There was a lot of extraneous excitement about, because all these media stars, movie stars were in the audience that night. I mean, Julie Andrews was there, as well as the stars of the film, and Tim Robbins, who had directed the film, was there. So that made it even more sort of in the spotlight. It was a great evening.
JM: And it was a great run, too, right? I mean, did the sales pick up immediately based on the reviews, or...? I know you added a performance.
KC: We did. In fact, this strikes me now, looking back on it 25 years hence, as really quite something extraordinary. We had planned seven performances, which was pretty typical in those days, and one of my jobs in music administration was to actually construct the season: when would the rehearsals be, and when would the performances be, and how they would sort out, and making sure they’re distributed on the right days so that we can make a subscription series on Wednesday, Tuesday, etc. So we had neatly organized that for seven performances, but when the subscription brochure went out, it began to be close to selling out, on subscription.
JM: Wow.
KC: So our box office people were saying, well, when we get to selling single tickets, we ain’t gonna have any to sell. (laughter) No, we’re not going to have enough to sell. So we actually did add an eighth performance to the season, before the run began, before the season started. And then, as you can see from the program magazine, after the run started we, perhaps, in retrospect, too hastily added a ninth performance --I think there’s a Saturday matinee that we added in -- which was a nice idea to satisfy the ticket demand, but it was, unfortunately, too late to get the word out. You can’t really sell 3,000 tickets... This was, of course, before social media and all that sort of thing. So that performance was not as well sold as we might have liked, but at least we were able to satisfy the demand for people who felt they were being shut out.
JM: So that was an amazing run for San Francisco Opera. I don’t know, I can’t think of an analog for more success as a new work being performed all over the world. Have you been tracking all the different productions? And, I mean, since you were there at the beginning for this piece, here we are 25 years later; it’s had 78, I think, productions.
KC: More than that. I think we’re close to 90 now. Jake’s website points all this out. I think it’s been performed in 13 countries, on five continents. Clearly, the most successful -- full-length, at least -- opera of the twenty-first century, in terms of the number of performances, and I’ve been to a lot of them, in various places. What was clear, evidently -- I was sort of not closely aware of this, but what came to be evident was that our production was a little too bulky, a little too massive, to really be done in a lot of other theaters. As far as I know, the only other theater that did it was actually Sydney, Australia.
But shortly after our premiere, a consortium was formed of seven, I believe, seven different opera companies, with a new production in mind that was directed by Leonard Foglia, and that’s the production that we’re essentially doing, with some modifications, this fall here in San Francisco, but it’s been done in many, many places, and I’ve seen it in quite a few.
And what’s been fascinating to me is seeing the variety of artists that have taken on these roles. It was hard not to think of the original performance as sort of definitive in their characters, particularly Frederica Von Stade as Mrs. De Rocher, the mother of the prisoner, the convict. Her scene where she pleads for her son’s life before the Parole Board is indelibly etched in my mind. I can see it right now.
But also Susan Graham, as creating the role of Sister Helen, which I don’t believe she ever sang again anywhere else. Her father died in the middle of the run of performances, which was a traumatic thing for her, and it’s a great credit to her that she was able to carry on, but I think maybe there was an association with that that she didn’t want to return to. She has, of course, sung the role of the mother, which she will be doing for us this fall, for the mother of the prisoner.
And, of course, John Packard, who created the role of the prisoner himself, Joseph De Rocher. That seemed definitive also. I remember we had auditioned a lot of baritones to try to find somebody who had not only the vocal qualities we needed, but also could portray that slight image of menace. We need to believe that this guy could have brutally killed these two kids. And when John Packard came up for his audition, I know that Lotfi thought, I think this is the guy.
There were two casts, essentially, for the role. The New Zealand baritone, Teddy Tahu Rhodes, also sang some performances, very effectively, of the prisoner, and Kristine Jepson sang some performances as Sister Helen.
But what I was getting at is that having seen this piece now in a lot of other places, with a lot of other people singing these roles, it was clear that although Jake wrote these parts for very specific people, and they really defined them, creating the world premiere, it was a piece that could be done by many others, and interpreted in many different ways. And we’ll see, of course, new interpretations this fall, as well.
JM: It’s not unlike Verdi’s Otello with Francesco Tamagno, and Victor Maurel, that just couldn’t possibly be eclipsed, their great performances, but now it’s done whenever we have a great tenor who wants to take on the role.
KC: Yeah, I think that’s true. You could think of that, certainly, with Broadway shows, as well, like Mary Martin in The Sound of Music. Could anyone possibly outdo that? Well, Julie Andrews managed to (laughter) come pretty close, I’d say. So even though it seems that someone has given the definitive performance of a role, that doesn’t necessarily mean that somebody else can’t bring a startling new interpretation to it.
JM: It’s one of the beauties of the standard repertoire, I guess. New audiences get to form their own relationships with these pieces, and new artists step into the roles.
KC: Absolutely. Yeah, it would make no sense if we were continuing to recycle the same Verdi, Wagner, Rossini, Mozart pieces with identical vocal interpretations each time. That’s one of the thrills of it: it’s to see how someone new brings this off.
JM: And with Dead Man Walking, I know you’ve been teaching courses about this particular opera. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’ve put together for a class, and the response of some of the students who are learning about opera, maybe for the first time, or kind of developing their knowledge of opera, their interaction with this piece in a classroom setting?
KC: Sure. I have taught quite a lot about Dead Man Walking. In fact, fairly early on, when this consortium of companies was formed to create the Leonard Foglia production, Opera America, which is a service organization for opera companies, asked me to teach an online course, which I did -- I think it was four different lectures -- and I did it again some years later. They’d forgotten that they’d asked me to do it, and then they asked me again, (laughs) and I did a new version for this incredible piece that was getting performed here, there, and everywhere. And what I’ve mainly done in trying to interest people in the opera is to give them a hint of the musical characterizations, and I do quite a bit… There are lots of videos available, short clips of videos from productions all around the world, and so, for example, I will play the entire aria of Sister Helen, “This journey,” skipping the policeman in the middle, (laughs) but I think I start with Opera Parallel, which is a small company in San Francisco that does contemporary work, and then I switch to Minnesota, and then I think I go to Spain, so three different artists in three different companies, doing this aria in succession. So, right there, I’m illustrating the various ways of interpreting the piece, but also showing sort of the formal structure that comes right out of an ancient tradition of opera to make these scenes work.
JM: And Dead Man Walking is kind of alone in the repertoire, as a new work that has had this kind of success after the world premiere, and maybe a second production, maybe a third. Ninety is crazy. (laughter) It is in a class of its own. Can you speak a little bit about what you hope will come forward with new works? Do you think we have another Dead Man Walking right around the corner, or can lightning strike again?
KC: Oh, I’m sure we’ll have another similar, sort of iconic hit like this coming along. What is illustrative about it, for me, is the fact that this is possible in the twenty-first century, that we will still have world premieres that sink without a trace after their initial runs, but that was sort of true back in the day, as well. If you think of, like, Donizetti wrote 65 operas. How many of them could you name right now? (laughter) Most of them disappeared without a trace, but many of them are memorable, and I would go see them if I had a chance. So that’s a factor that we deal with now, that we keep trying with new pieces, and some of them really work; others don’t quite make it, and don’t get much attention after their world premieres. But others are well worth looking at again, and every so often you get that really special piece that will capture people’s imagination, and resonate in a special way. It takes all those factors that I mentioned Jake enumerating: it takes, of course, the score; (laughs) it takes the story, the libretto, the production, the singers; and then that audience factor that you never know about until the last minute.
JM: Do you have any final things you want to say about Dead Man Walking at 25?
KC: I’ll just say that I’m thrilled that it’s coming back, and that it’s just impossible to believe that it has been 25 years since this piece first happened. I know that Jake has now become sort of a -- although he’s still not an old guy -- he’s become sort of a senior figure in the world of American opera. He does a lot of master classes, and teaches. He’s going to be joining the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. So he’ll be passing on what he has learned in the course of not only this piece but the other operas that he’s written throughout his career. And so I’m so glad that attention will be paid to this piece, once again here in San Francisco.
JM: Wonderful. Well, thank you, Kip. It’s been a pleasure hearing about it from you.
KC: My pleasure, too. Thanks.