There might be a few local residents who haven’t yet heard of Victory Hall Opera. But rest assured that opera aficionados nationwide—from the Deep South to the Pacific Northwest—have begun to take notice of the Charlottesville-based company.
Victory Hall is turning heads thanks to its embrace of cutting-edge productions, like its latest, a world premiere of the original opera Fat Pig.
“A big part of our mission when we started was to take the usual structure of opera and reinvent it,” says Miriam Gordon-Stewart, Victory Hall’s co-founder and artistic director. “Rather than singers being slotted in, the productions are based around the cast and our ensemble. It functions like a troupe. It’s the kind of model you might have seen…at some major theater companies.”
Now entering its seventh year, Victory Hall has put on 26 original productions, more than most similar opera companies stage in a six-year stretch. Five of them have been world premieres; several have been Virginia and U.S. premieres.
The company’s mission and production schedule have drawn the attention of critical U.S. opera onlookers. The Music Academy of the West has given VHO two national Alumni Enterprise Awards for putting on “revolutionary” shows. And The Washington Post called it “the future of the field.”
Now, Victory Hall has attracted a major national talent to star alongside its ensemble in Fat Pig, which premieres on January 22 and will be reprised on January 27.
Tracy Cox, a Dallas native and current Los Angeles resident, has become an in-demand soprano around the world. In addition to performing on some of the biggest stages—she’ll travel to New York to perform at the Metropolitan Opera for a to-be-determined run later this season—she’s also a prominent voice in the body positive movement, with more than 17,000 followers on her fat activism-focused social media platforms.
Cox’s combination of singing talent and activism came together to make her the ideal choice for Fat Pig. The subject of the opera convinced her to add two shows at a small, young opera company in central Virginia to her performing schedule. The show is “a story that we felt has never been represented in the opera—the story of a fat person’s experience,” Gordon-Stewart says.
For the lay opera observer, the notion is odd. Stereotypical opera singers are often big-bodied—“the fat woman with the horns,” Cox suggests. And the ability to sing at length without tiring goes hand in glove with body size, Gordon-Stewart admits. But bigger players are often cast in farcical roles and openly pilloried—never before, the Victory Hall artistic director says, has a lead operatic role been given to a fat person who is celebrated as such on stage. “Often, larger singers are asked to appear thin while playing their roles, or they are dressed to minimize their body and ignore the fact that they are fat,” Gordon-Stewart says.
Fat Pig is based on a play of the same name by Neil LaBute, with its original libretto written by Gordon-Stewart and music by Matt Boehler. The adaptation is Gordon-Stewart and singer/composer Boehler’s first opera, which will be performed at the V. Earl Dickinson Theater at Piedmont Virginia Community College with a small cast and chamber orchestra.
Cox, who had heard of Victory Hall and its repertory through her professional and personal network, believes Fat Pig is an important production for both the opera industry and body justice.
“I was instantly floored by the concept of the project,” she says. “Because there really has never been anything like this. Never has there been a piece where the romantic lead is cast as a fat woman.”
The LaBute play itself has drawn plenty of attention, winning multiple Off-Broadway awards while courting controversy. “He’s been accused of being misogynistic, but we both view his work as presenting misogyny as something you just have to deal with,” Cox says. “The piece presents a fat person who I feel like I understand but is not necessarily me.”
Gordon-Stewart says she and her team approached LaBute about turning Fat Pig into an opera because “we loved this play—it is controversial, and it is relevant.” LaBute, she says, gave them free rein to do what they would with the piece.
Gordon-Stewart says her own perspective as a singer afforded her a unique perspective when adapting Fat Pig to the opera. She found herself cutting significant text and adding new material while attempting to preserve LaBute’s voice. For Cox, the resulting adaptation was a revelation.
“For the first time in my career, I wasn’t worried about my body when I showed up on day one,” she says.