When I ask composer Ellen Reid what people should know about her friend and collaborator James Darrah, her answer is straightforward and concise: his name.
Why? Because “James is the future,” she says. “He comes from a place of knowing and loving so many art forms, and he can move between them all fluidly. James is opera.”
One sunny Friday in early December of last year, Darrah was busy being opera at the Ancient Order of the Wooden Skull animation studio in Glendale. When I arrived, the Los Angeles–based opera director was wrapping up a phone meeting with Jennifer Rivera, the executive director and CEO of Long Beach Opera. Maybe they were discussing the socially distanced performance of Philip Glass’s Les Enfants Terribles that Darrah was preparing to direct for the company on a parking-garage roof in May. Or perhaps they were making longer-term plans; in February, LBO would announce Darrah as its new artistic director and chief creative officer, only the third in the company’s 42-year history.
Inside the studio, Darrah was overseeing the production of Boston Lyric Opera’s stop-motion animated version of Glass’s Darrah had planned to direct the opera live in Boston. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, making that impossible, he encouraged the company to reimagine it digitally. The animated version streamed online from January to June and was praised as “[BLO’s] most ambitious and spectacular project of the season” by the . Another Darrah project, the episodic opera series , cocreated with Reid, ), debuted in June and is currently available on BLO’s website.
