It’s been 50 years since acclaimed Montana author Norman Maclean published “A River Runs Through It,” a mesmerizing memoir that has become one of the most iconic works associated with Montana.
The novella and film adaptation — starring Robert Redford and Brad Pitt — introduced millions to the state’s landscapes through a poignant look back at family, grief and fly fishing.
Soon, another generation of audience will be able to find their own meaning and connection to the work through a new medium — opera.
As the first work commissioned by Opera Montana, “A River Runs Through It” will premiere this fall in Bozeman, following a multi-year effort to adapt the novella to the operatic stage.
“When we had the opportunity, because of relationships internally, to bring ‘A River Runs Through It’ to the stage, we knew it was time to commission our first full opera,” Susan Miller, General Director of Opera Montana, told the Daily Montanan. “It’s such a meaningful story to Montanans, and has, for better or worse, changed our state in so many ways. But we knew we could tell a story not only relevant to Montanans, but a universal story about family, and how do you help somebody that won’t accept your help or doesn’t let you in.”
Opera Montana began thinking about bringing the story to the stage in 2022, as the opera was just getting back to producing full main stage shows again following the pandemic.
Matt Foss, stage director and one of the two librettists — the person who writes the text of the opera — for the show, had been in conversations with the Maclean estate for a while about turning the work into a play. Over time the idea morphed into an opera.
“I had very little ideas of how to make an opera, but a very good idea of where to go to find that out in Opera Montana,” Foss said.
Foss comes from a theater background, including with Montana’s Shakespeare in the Park, but he initially worked as a biologist with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. It was while working across the state’s landscapes that he fell in love with Maclean’s work.
“I care about this story, and each time I read this book, something changes, and yet there’s a foundational experience that is so acute and specific that my hope is that we can tell the story in an interesting and impactful that allows for that experience,” he said. “I want it to be excellent in hopes of someone in the audience having an experience like I did in my terrible first basement apartment in Red Lodge when I first read the novel, or sitting up on Line Creek Plateau, making notes in the margins on my breaks.”
Once the rights for the adaptation were secured, Opera Montana’s artistic director, Michael Sakir, said putting the rest of the creative team together was easy.
Kelley Rourke, a nationally-acclaimed figure in the opera world, was brought into the project as co-librettist and Zach Redler was brought on as the composer.
Between the three of them, “they were able to distill Norman Maclean’s novel into a great opera,” Sakir said.
“As you can imagine, it takes just so much longer to sing something than it takes to say something, and so to avoid a nine-hour opera for a relatively thin novella, they had to take some creative license. They have in some ways, not modernized it, but updated it with a contemporary lens,” he said. “The core of the story is still there. The focus on family and faith and fly fishing is still there, but they’ve given more agency, for example, to the female characters.”
Among the challenges of altering the story to a new medium, was the style in which Maclean wrote his novel. “A River Runs Through It” is nonlinear, with Maclean, in his 70s when he wrote the book, narrating the story decades after the fact.
“One of the great strengths of the book is its narrative voice, but a voice removed by decades, to me, is not what works for opera,” Rourke said. “We decided pretty early on that we wanted to keep the story immediate, which meant that we had to let go of some amazing sentences and ideas and reflections. But, just to say, we do lean into what this art form does really well.”
“Opera’s great strength is visceral emotion. You know, using your body as a resonating chamber at the very extremes and sending that human voice out to hit the audience in the sternum,” Rourke continued. “This story is so emotional and beautiful … and especially as a story of grief, that can feel very present and very potent for exploring in opera.”
While opera might seem like a daunting medium for a first time consumer, Miller, the general director, said “A River Runs Through It” is very approachable, which fits with Opera Montana’s mission.
“There are no rules about going to the opera. You don’t have to dress up but you can dress up if you want to,” Miller said. “We try to make it an incredibly welcoming space. And this particular production will be for all ages.”
Miller and Sakir said their choice in composer for the 90-minute production was also key to making the show accessible to audiences who might not otherwise attend an opera.
“We recognize that with a story like ‘A River Runs Through It,’ we’re going to be bringing in a lot of new people into the opera world, and the last thing we want to do is alienate them,” Sakir said.
He described the work of composer Zach Redler as equally “unapologetically romantic and uniquely sincere,” and “tuneful and catchy.”
“There will be ear worms that the audience leaves the theater humming after seeing the show, which is just something that you never come across these days,” Sakir said.
Redler told the Daily Montanan the style is a little bit of a crossover between opera and musical theater. Redler says audience members will be able to hear the influences of jazz, bluegrass, and Montana composer David Maslanka, and hopefully pick up the motivic themes of individual characters.
“There’s a lot of freedom in the opera,” Redler said. “There’s a straight-up country tune in the middle of this, which is just great.”
“A River Runs Through It” features a cast heavily drawn from Broadway stages and the Metropolitan Opera. There are 24 musicians and seven principal singers.
Sakir said casting the show was “an embarrassment of riches that we got to choose from,” with the directors hearing enough incredible auditions to cast the show “six times over.”
Baritone Schyler Vargas stars as Norman, the recently married eldest brother; tenor Michael Kuhn is Paul, the youngest brother, a newspaperman, gambler, and an artist with a fly rod; soprano Christine Taylor Price is Jessie, Norman’s fierce, funny, loving wife; tenor Ryan Bryce Johnson is Neal, Jessie’s brother; mezzo-soprano Megan Marino is Heidi (“Rawhide”), a local woman who fancies Neal and believes in love; mezzo-soprano Phyllis Pancella is Clara, Norman and Paul’s mother; and bass-baritone David Pittsinger is John, Norman and Paul’s father, a Presbyterian minister.
Due to professional obligations on stages around the east coast, the full cast has only been together briefly for workshops — with the first sing-through with orchestra coming up in March — but there was a concerted effort to bring everyone to Montana to get a full sense of the setting that is so essential to the novel’s story, which included a full-cast guided fly fishing trip.
In a statement, John Maclean, son of Norman and an author himself, said he understood the challenge of turning a well-known literary classic into an opera.
“The reward is a fresh perspective from a talented cast and writers who explore themes of love, loss – and fly fishing, of course – to bring the familiar characters to new life,” Maclean said. “My father would have been delighted to see his story on stage and his words, often only a heartbeat away from poetry, turned to song.”
“A River Runs Through It” will premiere at the Ellen Theater in Bozeman in September, and there will be additional performances in Missoula.
Montana PBS will be filming the production and will air it at a later date as well.
A special preview performance and workshop will take place on May 20 at National Sawdust Theatre in Brooklyn, New York, featuring Maclean, reading passages from his father’s novella paired with the corresponding musical pieces from the opera.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article misspelled the last name of composer Zach Redler.
