New York Times: Singing, and Signing, Beethovenʼs ʻFidelioʼ in Los Angeles

Excerpt by Adam Nagourney for The New York Times published April 13, 2022

A new production of Beethoven’s opera “Fidelio” will feature members of the White Hands Choir of Venezuela, which includes deaf and hard of hearing performers. Credit: Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York Times

“DJ Kurs has been the artistic director of the Deaf West Theater, a theater company created here by deaf actors, for the past 10 years. But he had never seen the Los Angeles Philharmonic or been to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, its renowned home, even though he grew up in Southern California.

“He will be there this week, though, leading seven actors from Deaf West in an innovative production of “Fidelio,” Beethoven’s opera about the rescue of a political prisoner, in a collaboration with a cast of singers and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The actors — along with a chorus from Venezuela whose members are deaf or hard of hearing and will also be signing — will be center stage on opening night Thursday, expressively enacting the lone opera of a composer who had progressive hearing loss while writing masterpiece after masterpiece. In this “Fidelio,” the singers will stay in the background.

“Opera itself as an art form, it has not been accessible to our world,” Kurs, 44, said the other day through a sign- language interpreter. Deaf West, he said, had been approached in the past about collaborating on operas but had always declined.

“But after nearly two years of not performing because of the pandemic — and after watching an energetic tape of Leonard Bernstein conducting “Fidelio” — Kurs decided to accept this offer to work with the Philharmonic and its music director, Gustavo Dudamel.

“The extraordinary nature of the endeavor was clear as singers and actors gathered last week for rehearsals at a United Methodist church in Toluca Lake, in the San Fernando Valley, some 10 miles from Disney Hall. Each day was a mix of languages, movement and simultaneous translations — between voiced German, Spanish and English and signed American Sign Language and Venezuelan Sign Language.”