Skylark Opera Theatre presents the ‘New Seven Deadly Sins’

It all started at Carnegie Hall.

When New York’s legendary cathedral of classical music offered to commission a song cycle for Broadway star Audra McDonald to premiere, her pianist and music director, Ted Sperling, suggested they ask seven American composers or composer-librettist teams to each write a song based upon one of the seven deadly sins of ancient Catholic theology.

After all these centuries, those sins — anger, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, sloth and vanity — still find their way into popular culture, such as in the murder-mystery movie “Seven.” But these composers gave each song an interesting twist, viewing the sin from the perspective of the sinner and sometimes from a personification of the sin itself, often employing wry humor to make its point.

For the 2004 premiere, McDonald presented it in concert. Now, St. Paul-based Skylark Opera Theatre is going several steps further, transforming each song into a fully staged vignette for “The New Seven Deadly Sins,” which runs Thursday through Sunday at the Crane Theater in northeast Minneapolis.

Skylark’s artistic director James Barnett discovered the work via one of the songs at a sheet music store in Chicago. Digging deeper into the work from which it came, he uncovered the contributions of the other composers.

“I have performed Kurt Weill’s ‘The Seven Deadly Sins’ three times now,” Barnett said last week after a rehearsal at a Minnesota Opera Center studio. “That was a ballet opera that he and Bertolt Brecht put together in Paris with one singer, one dancer and a male chorus. I’ve always thought about some new version of this.”

The song cycle that McDonald commissioned seemed just the thing. But first he needed a soprano with the kind of theatricality and stylistic versatility that the Emmy-Grammy-Tony-winning McDonald possesses. He thought of Bergen Baker.

Baker climbed aboard, but then he needed a choreographer who could take these songs and turn them into theater, even a collection of little operas. Skylark found her in Nikki Swoboda, who directed last summer’s production of “Marry Me a Little,” building a theater piece out of songs by Stephen Sondheim.

“Having Bergen at the helm made it such an easy yes,” Swoboda said. “I was really excited to stage it. I love movement as storytelling, using different genres of movement and music.”

Baker handles all the singing in “The New Seven Deadly Sins,” performing with dancers Patrick Jeffrey and Sarah Potvin.

Swoboda’s imaginative staging finds Baker channeling the sin of anger through Michael John LaChiusa’s cheery and hilariously passive-aggressive breakup song, “The Christian Thing to Do.” (“I know you seem relieved/ I hope that’s what you are/ I hope you’re never, ever trapped inside a burning car.”) Lust is summoned in a bluesy kitchen seduction on Steve Marzullo and Mark Campbell’s “Burning the Sauce.” And some audience participation is required on the rapidly pattered hymn to sloth, Jeff Blumenkrantz’s “My Book.”

Other composers involved include two who have had their works staged by Minnesota Opera: Ricky Ian Gordon (2007’s “The Grapes of Wrath”) and Jake Heggie (2018’s “Dead Man Walking”). Completing the list of composers are two songwriting teams, Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens (“Ragtime” and “Once on This Island”) and jazz musicians and radio hosts John Pizzarelli and Jessica Molaskey.

“I think it’s the humanity of it and the fear that we can connect with those sins at some level,” Swoboda said. “At what point does that sin take us over and change our character? … For example, how much does envy impact how I behave?”

“Each of these pieces is an opportunity for us to see ourselves in each of these situations,” Baker said. “Because humans are flawed creatures.”

Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.

When: 7 p.m. Thu. and Fri., 2 and 7 p.m. Sat., 2 p.m. Sun.

Where: Crane Theater, 2303 Kennedy St. NE., Mpls.