'Staggerwing' soars again, honoring Kansas aviators in flight and feeling

“Staggerwing” is a contemporary opera that tells a Kansas story in an artful, accessible way. Opera Kansas, which premiered the work in 2021, presented a longer version May 29-June 1. 

“Staggerwing” took flight when composer Lisa DeSpain and librettist Rachel J. Peters were named winners of Opera Kansas’ 2020 Zepick Modern Opera Competition, a $25,000 commissioning award that drew proposals from all over the world. Since then, the opera has been on the ascent. After its world premiere at the Kansas Aviation Museum, DeSpain and Peters kept working on it. A new version, with a half-hour of additional music, premiered at Vanderbilt University in October before coming to Kansas last week.

The show’s central characters are two pioneering female aviators, Louise Thaden and Blanche Noyes – sung by Michaela Larsen and Isabella Ruano, respectively. Their careers as racing pilots are supported by an ambitious pair of Wichita businesspeople, Olive Ann and Walter Beech. In 1936, the first year when the coast-to-coast Bendix Air Race allowed female pilots, the Beech Aircraft Corporation asked Thaden and Noyes to enter the race with the Beechcraft Model C17R Staggerwing.

The air race (in which — 90-year-old spoiler alert — Thaden and Noyes are victorious) provides a through-line. Scenes of the duo, side-by-side in the cockpit during the nearly 15-hour race, alternate with flashbacks that trace each woman’s path to the sky. 

A quartet of clarinet, bass, piano and drum set accompanies the earthbound scenes. Under the musical leadership of Simon Hill, the ensemble efficiently evokes the big bands that traveled through the Kansas of the 1930s along with the era's popular show tunes and musicals. 

DeSpain and Peters have a period-appropriate approach to musical comedy as well, highlighting good-natured jocularity across gender lines, and tagging more light-hearted numbers with spoken punchlines. “You know we’re… female, right?” Blanche says after getting word from Walter Beech that they have been tapped to fly in the Bendix. I was reminded of Frank Loesser, the composer behind “Guys and Dolls” and “The Most Happy Fella.”

For Blanche and Louise’s scenes aloft, percussionist Luc Brust gets up from his drum set and moves to the vibraphone, an instrument whose hollow, metallic resonance evokes the spaciousness of open air. Vibraphone notes ring and decay during “On Wild Wings,” a beautiful, simple duet that arrives early in the show. “Through open sky, in untrammeled air, absolute serenity, abiding peace. Joy, purest joy,” Louise and Blanche sing. “Free, free in flight, we float away.”

Free, but lonely. The male characters of the show support their wives’ and daughters’ ambitions — as aviators and, in Olive Ann Beech’s case, as a businesswoman. Yet they cannot change the fact that these women, in their drive to do the extraordinary, chafe against the normative, patriarchal expectations of feminine domesticity. Peters’ libretto and DeSpain’s score are not didactic or polemical; themes like this one emerge organically. The opera opens a space in which to reflect on the emotional currents behind and within the historical facts. (“Staggerwing” shares this quality with Michael Ching’s “Notes on Viardot,” a historical opera that Music On Site presented in Wichita last December, with Larsen in the title role.)

As Thaden and Noyes, Larsen and Ruano effortlessly rise to the challenge of carrying the show’s most lyrical, emotional moments. They also exhibit pinpoint comic timing during fleet-footed scenes with each other and with other members of the ensemble. Their duet, “On Wild Wings,” is a highlight, and Larsen unfolds a beautiful tone in “Dreamland,” a brief solo aria. “Dreamland” leads into “Bodies in Motion,” an ensemble section, new to the expanded version, that ups the dramatic intensity at the opera’s midpoint.

The opera’s third female aviation pioneer, Olive Ann Beech, doesn’t have much new material to sing, at least as far as I recall. As a result, with other parts of the opera expanded, she and her husband Walter now occupy a somewhat smaller portion of the narrative than they did in the 2021 version. Nevertheless, both characters are sharply drawn, musically and in Peters’ libretto. As Olive Ann, Danielle Herrington sings with bright tone and a glinting eye, demonstrating the spirit it took to stay afloat as a business executive in a male-dominated field. Walter, as played by Paul Hindemith, is a gruff businessman with a generous heart.

To be a pilot in the 1930s was to risk life and limb, a fact highlighted by a choral litany of female pilots who died too young. Capping the list is Dewey Noyes, Blanche’s husband, who tells us that he died in 1935 in an “ice storm over Rochester, in a Beechcraft Staggerwing Model Seventeen R” – the same model of plane Blanche flew to racing triumph the following year. As Dewey, Nathan Snyder bids Blanche farewell with the words, “Lift off into the heavens with me,” beautifully arching a long-sustained final note.

Tim Bostwick is affecting as Louise’s conflicted father, Roy, who calls his daughter “pal” and relates to her as “the son I never had.” Craig Moman, Nico Caruso, and Samuel Leopold are effective in supporting roles, with Leopold putting on a creditable German accent.

The creative leadership for this “Staggerwing” is all local, with stage direction by Jesse Koza, music direction by Hill, and scenic design by Jordan Slusher. Slusher also created the projections for the show, featuring subtly animated clouds during airborne scenes and well-timed interpolations of historical imagery.

With its blend of historical reverence, musical wit, and emotional clarity, “Staggerwing” earns its return to the stage. Opera Kansas has not only championed a new work but helped shape it into something lasting: an opera that soars with the same grace and daring as the aviators it honors.

Sam Jack is a poet, a classical tenor, and the adult services librarian at Newton Public Library. He performs with several local groups, including Wichita Chamber Chorale, Wichita Grand Opera, and Opera Kansas. He received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Montana.

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