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Michael McLeod
I really enjoyed interviewing this woman.
If you asked me what I have most enjoyed about being a journalist it's meeting people I never might have encountered otherwise and being tasked to understand them and tell their stories.
Just finished this one.
Here are the two reasons why Alexandra Enyart is the perfect choice to serve as guest conductor for Opera Orlando’s May production of “As One”:
As a conductor, she knows the show inside out. As an individual, she’s lived it.
“As One” is a chamber opera about a transgender woman’s odyssey of self-discovery, as portrayed by two singers, each of whom represents the same person: “Hannah Before” and “Hannah After.”
The genius of the show is its adaptation of one of musical theater’s core conventions – a couple falls in love while fending off the world – to dramatize a single individual’s battle towards self-discovery and acceptance.
“As One,” composed by Laura Kaminsky with a libretto by Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed and first performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2014, is an extended duet between a male (a baritone) and a female (mezzo soprano). One of its most striking theatrical elements is that quite often, as they sing together, the performers register precisely the same emotion, peeling back layers of experience and discovery concurrently, as one.
Enyart, who first directed As One in Chicago, where she now serves as music director of Thompson Street Opera Company, grew up as Alex Enyart in a musically-inclined family in the small, conservative Appalachian city of Alexandria, Ky.
“My mother played English oboe and English horn,” she says. “My dad was a drummer in a rock band. They’d play in the basement. They were always looking for a bass player, and I’d get drafted.”
Teased when she dared to grow her hair long, she knew from early on that escaping was her only path to freedom. “I knew I was different. There was a lot of repressing. But I knew that I was going to have to move away from where I was.”
She left in her early 20’s to study music at the University of Louisville, where she would eventually earn a Masters Degree in conducting and begin taking hormone therapy – secretly, at first, while still dressing as a male. That changed, literally overnight, with the help of an understanding professor she confided in and an assist from the school’s student orchestra.
She remembers the date: Feb. 23, 2017. The day before, she had conducted the orchestra’s rehearsal dressed like a male. Afterwards the professor had quietly informed the orchestra members that she’d be conducting as a woman the next time they saw her.
“That rehearsal the next day – the flow between me and the orchestra was entirely different,” she says. “The energy between us was utterly new and totally amazing. Suddenly there were just no barriers.”
Music and her new life have intertwined ever since. Enyart has directed numerous productions of “As One,” including one in Australia, and has been hailed by critics back home as a harbinger of diversity in the burgeoning arena of small scale, “storefront” urban opera companies.
“The transgender community is only beginning to have a seat at the table,” wrote one reviewer. “If you Google the words ‘trans, orchestra and conductor,’ the first results will be for Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Enter Alexandra Enyart.”
“As One” will be performed by Michael Kelly and Elise Quagliata at Harriett’s Orlando Ballet Centre, accompanied by an Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra string quartet, on May 21 and May 23.
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