Theaters are never truly dark. In between performances, a simple floor lamp is placed onstage and switched on. It’s called a ghost light, and depending on whom you ask, it’s either a practical safety measure or a way to ward off spirits. Some say it actually welcomes them.
As audience members entered the auditorium of the Dutch National Opera on Friday for the world premiere of “We Are the Lucky Ones,” they were greeted by a ghost light that, true to its history, was open to interpretation.
For one, it was a signal of artifice. “We Are the Lucky Ones” may be a moving work of music theater, but it is, ultimately, theater: a space for storytelling and reflection. The ghost light, though, also had a hint of the supernatural, summoning eight singers to an uncanny, purgatorial space so they could share their secrets, regrets and worries for the future.
Their stories are, for the most part, true. “We Are the Lucky Ones,” with music by Philip Venables and a libretto by Ted Huffman and Nina Segal, is based on interviews with about 80 people born between 1940 and 1949, distilled into a headlong rush through time.
What emerges, in an opera as compact and overwhelming as “Wozzeck,” is a portrait of a generation told with compassion, wisdom and artfulness. You can imagine a version of this story as an indictment of the age group that, as one character admits, “made a mess of things.” But while opera thrives on simplicity, with love blossoming over the few minutes of an aria, “We Are the Lucky Ones” is anything but simple.
Venables and Huffman, who are emerging as one of the great opera partnerships today, have previously created works of layered meaning: “Denis & Katya” (2019) raised complicated questions about the internet and storytelling; “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions” (2023), about history and community.
Here, working with Segal, a playwright, on her first opera, they focus on a specific age group, but more than that they are interested in the middle class. The interviews were limited to countries in Western Europe and Scandinavia, as well as the United States. Places, in other words, that enjoyed a golden age of plenty in the aftermath of World War II.
The creators, indebted to the literature of Annie Ernaux and Karl Ove Knausgaard, aspire to broad history through personal stories. It’s an impossible task in the 100 minutes of their opera, but by homing in on the middle class, they connect the dots of shared experience while also exploring how a generation shaped and became entwined with modern capitalism.
Huffman and Segal’s libretto moves quickly through over 60 scenes, some just seconds long, performed by a cast of eight singers who inhabit a wide variety of characters, regardless of gender or race. When they come together, it is most often to express a common experience: buying a house, going on vacation, dying.
Along the way, the creators of “We Are the Lucky Ones” push the boundaries of opera, and not because it calls on its performers to speak with actorly skill. With “Total Eclipse of the Heart” used for the curtain call and exit music, you get the impression that orthodoxy isn’t the point. But this work, while plotless, is undoubtedly operatic in the way it elevates everyday life to the realm of poetry, expressed in a graceful balance of head and heart.
Beginning in 1940 and ending in the present, the opera reflects on historical events like the fall of the Berlin Wall and Y2K, as well as the signposts of life itself: Characters are born, become parents, fall in love with someone else in midlife or lose a spouse, wonder why their knees no longer work. They also worry about work and politics, about climate and the possibility that they wasted their lives on anxiety and self-loathing. The libretto is plain-spoken, but, like a Broadway lyric by Sheldon Harnick, sings because of its simplicity.
Speaking, singing and dancing for nearly the entire running time, the cast gets more than the usual workout. (Same for the orchestra, the Residentie Orkest, grandly characterful under the baton of Bassem Akiki.) Still, “We Are the Lucky Ones” came off as well rehearsed on Friday, to the point that no one appeared uncomfortable.
The tenor Miles Mykkanen impressively tapped through a glib monologue about being 83 and not having to think about the future; earlier, the bass Alex Rosen had also danced without effort. Helena Rasker had a rich contralto, but also a comic touch in conveying the frustration of a woman whose children don’t want to inherit her furniture. The baritone Germán Olvera delivered perhaps the bleakest speech, in which his character wondered whether “most people, even young people, would choose to live as comfortably as possible within a broken system, rather than try to build something new.”
With scene-stealing sounds, the tenor Frederick Ballentine and the soprano Jacquelyn Stucker were most memorable in vocal solos, while the soprano Claron McFadden and the mezzo-soprano Nina van Essen were just as captivating for their delicacy.
Huffman also directed and designed the production (in addition to designing the gala-attire costumes with Sonoko Kamimura), which looks like vaudeville in the bardo. With almost no set, “We Are the Lucky Ones” unfolds in front of the theater’s fire curtain and around the orchestra pit. It’s so minimal, it could travel easily not only to other opera houses, but also to concert halls around the world.
The performers tape sheets of paper to the wall to build a screen for nostalgic photos and videos, by Nadja Sofie Eller and Tobias Staab, that resemble home movies but are eerily generated by A.I. It’s one of the many ways that Huffman’s production maintains an unsettling atmosphere. Bertrand Couderc lights the performers from below, lending them a campfire spookiness and the otherworldliness of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Occasionally, singers put on a variety show number with a mask or a prop; they also pick up microphones as if in a cabaret act.
Some of that takes its cue from Venables’s patchwork score, which matches the opera’s timeline with a Hollywood waltz, a dreamy Disney harp or a big-band swing. With so many dance rhythms, it all begins to take on the feel of a danse macabre. He moves freely among genres, keeping the music at a slight distance from the stories onstage, such as a complaint about a cleaning lady sung like a tango out of a show by Kurt Weill.
As in the A.I. footage, there is an uncanniness to his music: “Happy Birthday” and “Auld Lang Syne” through a carnival whirl. But Venables also writes with representational sound. There is a funny inhale and exhale gesture in a passage about getting high, an Alma Mater-style chorus for describing reunions and the brassily grand chords that Dvorak would use for American wonder.
Like the best of opera, “We Are the Lucky Ones” often says two things at once, between the libretto and the score. The cast comes together, for example, to sing about the happiness of getting older with health and money intact over pounding, ever-higher piano chords; the music feels as if it could collapse under its own weight.
In a way, it does by the end of the opera. The music shrinks, lonely and suspended, mirroring decline and death, the ultimate shared experience. Characters discuss how it happens and with whom, if anyone. We have followed them for eight decades, as they changed the world and were left behind as it continued changing without them. All that remains, when they go, is an account ledger: the value of a life.
We Are the Lucky Ones
Through March 30 at the Dutch National Opera, Amsterdam; operaballet.nl.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/arts/music/we-are-the-lucky-ones-amsterdam-review.html
