Bisbee's Copper Queen Hotel serves as setting for new opera

COVID-19 threw a wrench in Arizona Opera‘s plans to premiere its latest commissioned opera last season.

So the company pivoted.

Instead of mounting “The Copper Queen” on a virtual stage as part of its reimagined 2020-21 season, Joseph Specter and his all-female production team made it into a feature film.

Next week, Arizona Opera will premiere “The Copper Queen” in a Tucson movie theater instead of Tucson Music Hall.

“There has been an explosion of creativity in opera during the pandemic. Arizona Opera is not alone in that regard, but I do think we’ve done something very special with ‘The Copper Queen,’” said Specter, the company’s general director. “The things we are able to accomplish with film relative to the stage — with the camera, you are really able to be there in the middle of this intense action. It couldn’t have worked out better.”

“The Copper Queen” will have two showtimes daily — at 2 and 7 p.m. — Oct. 29 through Nov. 4 at Tucson’s two Harkins Theatres — the Spectrum on the south side and Arizona Pavilions in Marana — before the company posts the movie on its website for on-demand viewing.

Arizona Opera teamed up with Phoenix-based Manley Films to turn “The Copper Queen,” the company’s second commissioned opera after its 2017 world premiere of “Riders of the Purple Sage,” into a movie. After a few pandemic-prompted delays — they had hoped to film in fall 2020 but put it off because of rising coronavirus infection rates — Arizona Opera spent fives days in May filming from its Roma and Raymond Wittcoff Black Box theater in Phoenix.

It is the first movie for the company, which also scored another first with “The Copper Queen.” It was the first time it has had an all-female creative team: conductor Daniela Candillari, director Crystal Manich, assistant director Haley Stamats, set designer Liliana Duque Piñeiro and costume designer Alice Fredrickson.

Working on an all-woman team was “like having a good conversation with old friends,” Piñeiro said. “I think the female point of view was specific for the subject matter, as well.”

“The Copper Queen,” which Arizona Opera commissioned in 2015 from composer Clint Borzoni and librettist John de los Santos, is a story told in two centuries through two women’s experiences in Room 315 of Bisbee’s The Copper Queen Hotel.

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In 1910, Julia Lowell uses the room to satisfy the men of Bisbee, which is not by her choice. She is being held in the room and forced to service the men in town. In 2010, Addison Moore, seeking to heal from the recent passing of her grandmother, checks into Room 315 and is haunted by Julia’s ghost, which roams the room and recounts her brutal existence at the hotel and her violent death.

The story, which has some disturbing scenes of violence — although they are tame by today’s Hollywood standards — and some sexual innuendo, is one of redemption, connection and friendship. All of the action takes place in Room 315, which Piñeiro created in the 5,500-square-foot Black Box theater. The goal, she said, was to maintain the dramatic and theatrical feel in the film version.

“We never wanted to lose sight that we were taking a theatrical approach to the film,” said the Puerto Rico-based Manich, a veteran opera stage director who has dabbled in film shorts but had never made a feature film before “The Copper Queen.” “In the film we actually ended up using some theatrical devices that we would have done on stage.”

“The Copper Queen” is not the first opera to be made into a movie. That credit goes to Italian-American opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti, whose 1951 film “The Medium” was the first known feature-length movie based on an opera.

“But maybe this opera is unique in that it was never intended to be a film,” Manich said. “It was intended to be on stage, but now it’s debuting as a film. And I’m hoping that this film will really inspire people who want to create opera strictly for the film medium.”

Manich also hopes that new audiences will discover opera from the experience of seeing it in a movie theater.

“I want them to be moved. I want them to feel,” she said. “The impact of the story and the music will resonate. I’m really excited for people to get invested into the story.”

“I think this film will be able to get audiences excited. I think it’s a good introduction” to opera, added Piñeiro. “It’s not musical theater. We have seen so many musicals that have become films. I think this is a good moment for opera to do this version. It is not a recording of a live performance; it is a movie.”