Opera composers seldom meet their title characters, but that’s what happened to Bonnie Montgomery one afternoon in 2009, in the lobby of the Capital Hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas. Montgomery is the composer of “Billy Blythe,” a folk opera about the adolescence of Bill Clinton, as he documented it in his 2004 memoir, “My Life.” (Clinton was Billy Blythe until he took the name of his stepfather, Roger Clinton, at the age of sixteen.) “I told him about it really quickly,” Montgomery said the other day. “He said something along the lines of ‘Best of luck with that,’ and moved on.”
Montgomery, dressed in a blue gingham dress and wearing cowboy boots, had just arrived in Manhattan after a twenty-hour drive from Little Rock, to supervise the final preparations for the opera’s début, at the Medicine Show Theatre, on Fifty-second Street. Zachary James, the director, had reserved space in a rent-by-the-hour rehearsal studio in the theatre district, so that Montgomery could get acquainted with Jessica Bowers, a mezzo-soprano, who would be singing the role of Clinton’s mother, Virginia, and Alex Krasser, a swarthy twenty-four-year-old, who would be the show’s Billy.
The group began to quiz Montgomery, who is thirty-one, on her creative intentions. She grabbed a handful of her brown hair and knotted it at her neck and tapped the toe of one of her boots. She cited a passage from “My Life,” about young Bill and Virginia. “When I could get up early enough,” Clinton writes, “I loved sitting on the floor of the bathroom and watching her put makeup on that beautiful face.” The ritual, Clinton adds, “took a while, partly because she had no eyebrows.”
“That was the first inspiration for writing an opera,” Montgomery said. “I could just see him lying there with a sax, looking up at her, singing a really melodious aria and putting on her makeup.”
Bowers, a striking woman with creamy skin and velvety black hair, asked for notes on the number, “Virginia’s Aria / The Makeup Song.” “It’s interesting, because the music is really, really sexy,” she said. “But, then, it’s a conversation with my son. The song could be a slinking-across-the-piano, cabaret kind of thing. I’m just trying to figure out how not to be sexy around my son.”
Montgomery fished in her décolletage and produced a tube of coral lipstick, which she applied to her mouth. “People have said that’s like an Oedipal scene,” she said. “There’s a book on the psychology of Bill Clinton, and how the women he’s attracted to remind him of his mother.”
“It’s funny you would say that,” Bowers replied. “Someone once told me I look like Monica Lewinsky.”
“I have a question,” Krasser interjected. “This is about the young Bill Clinton, and the choice to make him a bass baritone.”
“He was a large boy at fourteen,” Montgomery said. “He was saddled with a lot of responsibility at that age. We imagined that his voice had changed by then.”
“It definitely adds to the good-old-boy sensibility,” James said.
James asked Bowers to sing “Virginia’s Aria.” Bowers drew a music stand toward her, and sang of little Billy fetching his mother’s morning coffee, brewed as “thick as syrup.” As Bowers sang, Montgomery closed her eyes and swayed in her seat.
When the song was over, Montgomery said, “I don’t want to seem like a redneck or a lunatic, over here crying, but you guys are absolutely splendid.” She turned to Bowers. “But can you say suhr-up?”
“What did I say? See-rup?” Bowers asked.
Over all, Montgomery said that the performers should heed the score’s notation of molto ritardando: don’t rush. “Down in Arkansas, we talk slower and we drive slower. Just take your own time.”
“I always feel like I’m wallowing,” Bowers said. “I’m afraid I’m going to make the opera feel like it’s five hours long.”
“Go with that,” Montgomery said.
Most of “Billy Blythe” is drawn from verifiable Clintonalia. For instance, the song “High Noon” depicts Billy swaggering away from a movie theatre after seeing what Clinton later called his favorite film. Only “The Melon Scene,” in which Billy and his grandfather swap tall tales about oversized watermelons, is fictional. The song shows the grandfather teaching Billy to use metaphor and become a storyteller.
“We interpreted that as his first stump speech,” James said.
“Oh, that’s fascinating,” Montgomery said. “I’m glad y’all saw that. I’m assuming it probably happened. I mean, melons were a big part of the culture. They still are!”
James excused himself to make his call time for “The Addams Family,” in which he plays the role of Lurch. Jonathan Rose, the production’s musical director, suggested that the group run through the opera’s final scene, a gauzy number in which Billy, having vanquished his menacing stepfather, helps his mother pack pecans and strawberries for a picnic.
“Quick question before we start,” Krasser said. “Puh_-kan_, or puh_-kahn_?”
“Puh_-kahn_,” Montgomery said. “Definitely puh_-kahn_.” ♦
