Michael Sumuel was a high school freshman competing in the all-state auditions when his voice broke.
“I was auditioning as a Tenor II. There was some descending line and I remember it started on a high G as it worked its way toward the cadence,” he recalls. “I’m going along fine and I get to the high G and I sing it, but my voice just cut out.”
Several years later and now firmly established as a bass-baritone, Sumuel will be singing the lead male role in Houston Grand Opera’s production of Porgy and Bess.
As Porgy, the disabled beggar who falls in love with Bess in a Charleston slum, Sumuel has been practicing his limp along with the striking repertoire of songs (“Bess, You is My Woman Now”) so familiar since the 1935 opening in New York City.
“Porgy, he’s just a good man. He’s got this light about him, this hopefulness in spite of what he’s been through, in spite of his disability,” Sumuel says. “He finds it in Bess. She brings out this light and joy within him in a way that he hasn’t experienced in quite some time.
“So when she’s gone – he’s returned from jail for contempt of court – everyone’s just trying to distract him from the fact that Bess is gone, his immediate reaction is: Where is she?
“They say she’s gone to New York. And this man who probably hasn’t gone beyond a six-block radius of where Catfish Row is located, is all of a sudden going to go to New York, thousands of miles away. It’s that hopefulness he keeps within him that really resonates with me.”
As for Bess (soprano Angel Blue), Sumuel sees her as “a product of her environment in a way that so many people have been. If you’re surrounded by certain violence and/or poverty and drugs falling into that hole or trap, it’s very easy. It’s very easy to see someone broken in that way and judge but she‘s addicted and been very much abused mentally and physically.
”She sees something good in Porgy and wants to hold onto that goodness but it seems like she always feels this darkness that can come in at any moment. Since she and Porgy started living together she is approached by Sportin’ Life with happy dust and she resists but Porgy is also there to drive them away,” he says. However when Sportin’ Life reappears while Porgy is away, she falls back into the addiction trap.
Composer George Gershwin, librettist DuBose Heyward and lyricist Ira Gerswhin based their new opera on a book and play written by Heyward. Since its start in 1935, Porgy and Bess had been in and out of favor with audiences and critics, but a 1976 Houston Grand opera production did much to restore its appeal. For the first time it was actually being done by an opera company, and now almost 50 years later, HGO is doing it again. (It also mounted productions in the 1986-87 and the 1994-95 seasons.) Demand has been so high that Houston Grand Opera has tacked on several more than the usual run of performances.
The HGO production is directed by Francesca Zambello. Other cast members Blake Denson as Crown, soprano Latonia Moore in her HGO mainstage debut as Serena and tenor Demetrious Sampson Jr. as Sportin’ Life. Acclaimed conductor James Gaffigan takes the podium, with Richard Bado conducting the November 11, 13, and 15 performances.
This will only be the second time that Sumuel will be singing the full Porgy and Bess opera although he’s done excerpts from it before. The first was just this past May at the Washington National Opera, in what he calls a very “intense” experience.
“The room is filled with people who look like you and who in many ways share a lot of the same experiences as you in the industry or just in life in general,” he says of that production.
Like many opera professionals, Sumuel got his start in church and school choirs. When he was in junior high is when he had his first classical, choral experience. “The theory and the sight reading really clicked for me.”
Going into college he knew he wanted to do something in the field of music, but wasn’t sure what it would be. He graduated from Columbus State University in Georgia and it was during that time he says that he discovered an affinity for Mozart. He got his master’s in opera performance from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music.
The Butler Studio graduate was most recently seen as Sharpless in Madame Butterfly at HGO. He’ll be back at the Metropolitan Opera to sing Papageno in The Magic Flute this season.
And anyone still wincing at the thought of Sumuel’s voice break during competition his freshman year, should know that in the following three years Sumuel competed as a baritone and made it to state each time.
Performances are scheduled for October 24 though November 15 at 7 p.m. Friday October 24, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays at the Wortham Theater Center, 501 Texas. For more information call 713-228-6737 or visit houstongrandopera.org. $30-$306.50.