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We used an app on our smartphone to check traffic on the way to the opera. We paid for parking by giving them our credit card that they put through on their smartphone. They scanned our opera tickets off our smartphone as we entered Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre. We took selfies at our seats with our smartphones and posted them online so others, with their smartphones, could see us happily attending an opera about a man who revolutionized personal computers.
Before the opera, they suggested we turn off our smartphones. There is a part actually IN the opera, the magnificent The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, where a singer tells us that we’ll all undoubtedly check our smartphones as soon as the show lights come back up. Indeed, most of us do. We need to check how many people liked the selfie before the curtain rose.
All of these behaviors aren’t because of one man, but Steve Jobs — entrepreneur, inventor, business magnate, media proprietor, some say genius, some say secular prophet — had a hand in shaping them. It was, in part, from his mind and from his hands that we all now have the world in our hands with our, now seemingly indispensable, smartphones.
Contemporary classical composer, 45-year-old Mason Bates, shaped from his mind a dazzling Grammy Award-winning opera around the life of Steve Jobs, with libretto by Mark Campbell (both of whom were in attendance at opening night). The opera is a wondrous and dramatic entry point for those who don’t think the opera is for them and a groundbreaking path forward for those who have remained comfortable with the traditional trappings of what opera has been. The music is challenging, the stage design is a visual feat, and the opera is thought-provoking.
The show (which runs through May 8) follows the visionary Apple co-founder as he looks back on his life and career, and confronts his own mortality. Directed, with striking clarity, by Atlanta Opera general and artistic director Tomer Zvulun (who recently discussed the show with ArtsATL), the show hinges on John Moore in the titular role. Moore swings the opera wide and expands it with his energetic and emotive singing. He’s played the role of Steve Jobs previously at the Austin Opera and the Lyric Opera of Kansas City.
Bille Bruley, in his Atlanta Opera debut, plays Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder. The tenor was flawless. His voice is as crisp and sweet as a Braeburn dusted with cane sugar. Elizabeth Sutphen, also in her Atlanta Opera debut, plays Chrisann Brennan, who had a romantic relationship with Jobs in the early days of Apple and gave birth to his child, Lisa, whom Jobs denied paternity of for years. Sutphen, a coloratura soprano, shone brightly with her agile runs and trills.
Sarah Larsen was riveting in her role as Laurene Powell Jobs, who married Steve Jobs in 1991 and was with him until his death in 2011. Larsen, a mezzo-soprano, grounds the positive and negative energies of Jobs throughout the opera. For all the energy he burns, she’s a smooth river, or the smooth stones beneath. Larsen is a deep and welcomed breath in the maelstrom of industry and enterprise. Adam Lau plays Kobun Chino Otogawa, a Zen priest and Job’s spiritual advisor. Lau is a bass whose singing resonates in every sense of the word.
Buddhism plays a major role in the opera. All well and good, but Jobs doesn’t seem to adhere to principal Buddhist teachings. He takes from it thoughts of simplicity, function, cleanliness, straightforwardness, yet he fails time and again with human interactions. Legendary Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh said that “understanding is love’s other name.” Love means to fully understand, or try to, another’s joys and sufferings. Because of Steve Jobs, many suffered personally. He was cruel. He was unforgiving. He was a task master. He was brutal. He ruthlessly wanted more from his employees. He demanded perfection, something that doesn’t exist.
Jobs himself said, “We’re here to put a dent in the universe.” He certainly has done a part in shaping our world but he dented many he came into close contact with. He denied his own child. He had a falling out with Steve Wozniak. His employees burned out in droves. Chinese workers leapt to their deaths by suicide due to brutal working conditions at manufacturing plants.
That said, it feels strange to pay homage to Jobs’ many successes (to note: Bates and Campbell don’t shy away at showing Jobs at his most ugly), when just outside the performance hall, there was a contingent of The Atlanta Opera’s hair and makeup crew protesting against the company for fighting their efforts to unionize (recently discussed on NPR).
It isn’t just Jobs that created Apple. It was countless others (programmers, designers, inventors and more) who long toiled to make Apple what it was, is and will be. It isn’t just Bates, who has written an incredible soundscape for the opera, but the musicians, sound engineers, and more that bring the score to stage. It isn’t just The Atlanta Opera’s management who gets to showcase an opera that should be seen by as many as possible, for it asks more questions than it answers. It’s also the lighting team, the wardrobe crew, the brilliant set designer, the hair and makeup team and many more.
Perhaps, through the lens of Steve Jobs’ turbulent and spectacular life, we can see our own lives as not denting the universe, but smoothing it out; burnishing it with our own singular and particular talents. To understand each other, beyond our phones and computers. To know that we are not machines, though our attachments to them might tell us otherwise, but simply human.
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Jonathan Shipley is a freelance writer based in Hapeville. His writing has appeared in such publications as the Los Angeles Times, National Parks Magazine and Earth Island Journal.
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