UK Opera’s new Underground Railroad production is a history lesson with Lexington ties

Mark Campbell was thrilled to get a message from a University of Kentucky Opera Theatre singer telling him he had made a mistake writing a portion of the group’s current production, “Sanctuary Road.”

It turned out there was a misunderstanding, but Campbell’s rightness or wrongness wasn’t the point.

“I loved that she was able to reach out to a living librettist and ask a question and say, like, ‘I don’t know if you meant this,’ and the living librettist was able to say, ‘No, this is actually from this part of this history,’ and students don’t get to work with living composers and librettists that often,” Campbell said. “There’s never a direct connection between, you know, Mozart and a student.”

Also, she was interested enough in the story the opera was telling to go do her own research.

“Sanctuary Road,” which Campbell wrote with composer Paul Moravec, is about the Underground Railroad, a network of people and places that helped more than 500,000 enslaved African-American people in the United States escape to freedom. The story has a Lexington connection, and UK Opera Theatre’s production plays March 7 to 9 at the Lexington Opera House.

“Even as a young black man, I didn’t know about this,” UK Opera Theatre Director Everett McCorvey said. “So, these college students certainly don’t know, and it’s been a real eye opener for them to do the research and learn. And it has made the students so much more engaged.”

The opera started with Moravec, who wanted to write an oratorio about the Underground Railroad, one of three he is writing in what he calls an American Voices trilogy. The first was about Ellis Island and the immigrant experience, and the last, which is still in progress, is on voting rights. Having written the music, he engaged Campbell to write the libretto, and that’s where Campbell discovered the writings of William Still, a conductor on the Underground Railroad.

“I looked at his writings, and I thought, what better way to honor the great work of this man and what he did for the Underground Railroad, then to write an oratorio based on his writings,” said Campbell, who based the libretto on Still’s “The Underground Railroad Records.” “I read the book. I found the stories in the book that kind of sang to me, that had hope, humor, love — everything that we look for when we try to set words to music — and then that was it.”

The oratorio enjoyed a successful premiere at New York’s Carnegie Hall, and Moravic and Campbell thought there could be more to the piece.

They called in stage director Dennis Whitehead Darling who help them adapt “Sanctuary Road” from a choral work with soloists to a fully staged opera, which had its world premiere in 2022 by North Carolina opera.

“As soon as I heard the first song, I was like, ‘Absolutely,’” Darling said. “It just caught me fully. Then I had the wonderful task of trying to stage this so that the staging matched the dramatic action that is being described.

“This is my third production that I’m working on, and I feel like we’re making some really wonderful leaps forward and bringing this closer to an opera.”

McCorvey came on board for a production in Lancaster, Pa., and subsequently conducted “Sanctuary Road” for the Virginia Opera.

“Paul had been keeping me informed about ‘Sanctuary Road,’” McCorvey said. “It was so interesting not only because I grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, during the Civil Rights Movement, and the whole thing resonated with me. And the other thing that resonated with me, obviously, was the fact that you know, the characters in the opera had a Lexington connection, and so I knew from the beginning that I wanted to bring this to Lexington.”

One of the most dramatic moments of the opera centers around Still and his long-lost brother Peter. Peter was at one time enslaved in Lexington starting a family legacy here that extends to the present day, as one of the Still family descendants is Valerie Still, the top scorer in men’s and women’s basketball in University of Kentucky history. Her brother, Art Still, was a UK football standout who went on to an NFL career. Both will attend “Sanctuary Road” along with other family and friends.

The UK production will make a little personal history for McCorvey as well.

“In my 33 years at UK, this is the first piece that I will have conducted at UK,” McCorvey said. “I do so much conducting outside of UK that I thought, you know, I should start doing a little more inside of UK as well.”

And UK is of course a first for “Sanctuary Road,” as it is the first student production of the opera. That gives the artists more time to explore the work and grow it than they usually have in the professional world, and it is also sharing an important piece of history that may be overlooked in a book or be overly focused on brutality in a movie.

“We’re shown the emotion and the need for freedom and seeing the freedom happen,” Darling said. “You get the celebration of William Still, honoring of his book and the things that he did. And then you get these narratives that really show oftentimes we only see the pain, but there was joy. There was joy, love, all of those things. They’re part of the human experience. And for us to see that, I think it allows a wider audience to look at this part and not brush it aside.”

The University of Kentucky Opera Theatre presents “Sanctuary Road”

When: March 7 and 8 at 7:30 p.m. and March 9 at 2 p.m.

Where: Lexington Opera House, 401 West Short St.

Tickets: lexingtonoperahouse.com, 859-233-3535