PUBLISHED IN 1984, the novel The House on Mango Street became a best-seller for author Sandra Cisneros, selling over six million copies and becoming a classic for readers in casual and academic settings. It’s an episodic books, its 44 chapters running anywhere from a sentence or two to several pages, the first-person account of a 12-year-old Chicana living in a changing Chicago neighborhood.
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| The 2025 Glimmerglass Festival world premiere production of "The House on Mango Street." Photo Credit: Kayleen Bertrand/ The Glimmerglass Festival |
Cisneros, who co-wrote the libretto with composer Derek Bermal, preserves her slyly evocative literary style, in which a simple description can be colored by an unexpected simile or metaphor. “Sally is the girl with eyes like Egypt and nylons the color of smoke,” runs one description; “At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth,” is another. The novel presents as a memoir; the opera turns it into a memory play.It opens with the sound of typing, of the old-fashioned variety wherein keys strike paper, setting us in a pre-computer era. We see a young woman at the typewriter, sitting downstage in front of a scrim. Conductor Nicole Paiement enters, but the music waits a moment. “I like to tell stories,” the young woman, Esperanza, declares. “I make a story for my life, for each step my brown shoe takes.” We’re then whisked to Mango Street as the scrim rises and the orchestra launches into a lively Latin rhythm.
Two adjacent houses are represented skeletally in John Conklin’s colorful set. The street is busy. Vendors hawk their wares. Esperanza shows us her “sad red house. The house I belong but do not belong to.” Soprano Mikaela Bennett is wonderfully charismatic, growing from a kid taking in the stories around her to a young woman who needs to leave – to acquire her own house, and to tell the stories of those she leaves behind. I’m trying to reconcile the Bennett I saw and heard, fully embodying this open-hearted but slightly volatile character, with the one whom her bio reports as having recently sung the final movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, which is as ethereal as a soprano can get. It only proves that she’s a singer – and actor – of tremendous range.
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| Mikaela Bennett as Esperanza. Photo Credit: Brent DeLanoy/ The Glimmerglass Festival |
People of color are the targets, of course, but there can be an unfortunate hierarchy within a neighborhood, as articulated by Cathy, Queen of Cats (Catherine Thornsley). She enters to a tango, introduces newly arrived Esperanza to the neighborhood, the chorus joining in for emphasis, then cautions, “I’ll be your friend. But only till next Tuesday. That’s when we move away. Got to. The neighborhood is getting bad.”
Esperanza can easily work it out. It’s what happens “every time people like us keep moving in.” It’s not an in-your-face moment. This “House on Mango Street” isn’t preachy. We learn through music and incident. As when Esperanza is cajoled into ponying up five dollars in order to be part-owner of a (stolen) bike. Rachel (Kaylan Hernandez) and Lucy (Samantha Sosa) join in an up-tempo duet to promise, “If you give us five dollars / We will be your friend forever.”
Which is one of Esperanza’s dreams – to have “Friends who would understand my jokes without my having to explain.” Thanks to a clever bike construction, all three ride the vehicle together while singing the Tejano-style “Friends Forever.” We fear it can’t last, and it doesn’t.
The music transforms into hiphop as they pass a group of older kids trying out dance moves, warning the girls to “Beware of being where you ought not to be.” It’s an excellent synthesis of rap with significantly better-written lyrics than what I’m used to hearing (usually blaring from an adjacent car at a stoplight in summer). The girls are undaunted; the boys resort to catcalling (“Piropopó”).
We witness the fraught relationship between streetwise Sally (Taylor-Alexis DuPont), and Preacher Man, her father (Shyheim Selvan Hinnant). His character has been given added dimension here. In the book, he’s got a Bible in one hand. In the opera, he’s got a pistol in the other as well, and he uses it to a tragic result – also revealing the official disinterest of white police in non-white crime.
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| Samantha Sosa as Lucy, Kaylan Hernandez as Rachel, and Mikaela Bennett as Esperanza. Photo Credit: Brent DeLanoy/ The Glimmerglass Festival |
He and some other boys accompany this with high-energy dance, the splendid work of choreographer Amanda Castro. The Latin rhythms and gang-boy dance suggest a parallel to “West Side Story,” but it’s an insufficient comparison. Bermel’s music certainly has a kinship to Bernstein’s – it’s hard not to be influenced by him – but they’re essentially drawing from the same well, and Bermel’s music goes in many more directions.
His studies sent him far beyond this country. France and Italy figure in his background, as do Bulgaria, Brazil, and Ghana. He’s a great fan of Bartók, which is evident in his 2009 orchestral composition “A Shout, a Whisper, and a Trace.” “Ritornello” combines sounds of a Baroque-era concerto grosso with what can be seen as its heir in a more-recent prog rock styling. And jazz meets classical in his “Migration Series,” a trenchant examination of the odyssey of African Americans moving from the southern US to the north during the first half of the 20th century, inspired by a series of paintings by Jacob Lawrence. Here Bermel’s gift for mixing disparate genres of music is truly at the fore as we hear blues and jazz and folk ingredients melding smoothly into (given the nature of those paintings) an often uncomfortable result. So his absorption of Latin styles into an opera canvas is just another facet of his impressive ability.
The Monkey Garden music underscore Esperanza’s reluctant sexual awakening. In the Monkey Garden, it’s merely (merely!) a kiss, and Sally counsels her with a view of sexual politics: “Flaunt, don’t give it; that’s the trick. / Be the carrot AND the stick. / Take and take,” she sings as a refrain, “Take and take. / Have your cake / and have your eat it too.” DuPont, as Sally, got a huge hand for the aria, well-deserved.
Esperanza finds better comfort in Four Skinny Trees, among the few products of Nature in the neighborhood. They dance around her in a stately manner and sing reassurance: “We grow up,” they insist, “and we grow down / And grab the earth between our hairy toes / And bite the sky with violent teeth / And never quit our anger.”
But it’s her friend Alícia (Sarah Rosales) who cautions, “This is the real world, mania. Not the one inside your head. They busted in last week looking for someone to deport. I had to hide.” Alícia also proffers “three things that matter.” Get an education, earn your own money, control your fertility.”
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| Edward Ferran, Zizhao Wang, William Raskin, Jabari Lewis, Reed Gnepper, Edmond Rodriguez, and Tshilidzi Ndou as Sire. Photo Credit: Kayleen Bertrand/ The Glimmerglass Festival |
Introspection and regret color the opening of the second act, with a succession of character studies that culminate in a moment for Esperanza’s parents. “Could’ve been, might’ve been, should’ve been,” they lament. The boys nearby go into a funky rap, always coming back to the motto “Try not to die.”
Esperanza’s journey changes, of course. Where once she felt merely at odds with Mango Street, now she wants to get away. Her friend Sally lacks the will to escape the father who beats her; her friend Alicia has to hide because of her immigrant status. “You’re the writer” says Alicia. “Figure out the ending.”
And the boys keep circling. Things come to a head at a carnival where, amidst an agitated mixture of frighteningly colorful costumes and props and set, a trio of neighborhood boys play a nasty game of keep-away with Esperanza’s notebook, soon gaining access to the young woman’s body. A crisis of her soul ensues, played through a magical, mystical sequence of rescue and rebirth. The finish of the piece brings us full circle, which is no surprise: Our storyteller has work to do.
“The House on Mango Street” is a brilliant opera that begs for a place in the repertory. It gives us a beautiful melding of music and words, brought to life here by an exceptional cast, orchestra, conductor, and director (Chía Patiño). It could not be more timely, yet there’s a timelessness about the story that never will fail to speak to a new generation. It’s the kind of piece that should welcome a new audience into the theater. It will stop being relevant when people learn to live with one another without conflict or envy or greed, which means that it never will stop being relevant.
The House on Mango Street
Music by Derek Bermel
Libretto by Sandra Cisneros and Derek Bermel
Conducted by Nicole Paiement
Directed by Chía Patiño
Alice Busch Opera Theater, The Glimmerglass Festival
Cooperstown, New York, July 18, 2025
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