To portray those characters, they employ an exceptional cast of young singers, all American bar Korean Hye Jung Lee. The opera is a sprawling canvas inhabited by characters of many types from many backgrounds, engaged in the rowdiness, the tawdriness, the youthful exuberance, the lewdness, the hardships and – in the end – the plain violence of those lawless days. If Adams and Sellars were visual artists, they would be Breugel. In their latest opera, Girls of the Golden West, John Adams and Peter Sellars demand that their audience take a cold, hard look at the dark side of the founding of California as a US state.
White Americans are turning on everyone else – violently forcing out blacks, Chinese and Latinos (the extermination of the native peoples would follow). We're in 1851, at the point of the California Gold Rush where the easily dug gold is beginning to run out and things are turning ugly. “The Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” sings Ned Peters, the freed black slave.
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