Santa Fe has seen its share of gloomy operas over the years — including Elektra , Tosca , Wozzeck , Salome , and Lulu , to name just a few — but now a musical fable with actual Gloomies onstage is looming on the horizon. Perhaps you’ve heard that 2024 is the 100th anniversary of Zozobra, the giant marionette whose annual incineration is the largest civic event on Santa Fe’s public calendar. As part of the centennial celebration, the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe and the Lensic Performing Arts Center have joined forces to commission and produce Zozobra: The Revenge , which has music by composer Joe Illick and a text by novelist Douglas Preston, based on the original Zozobra story by its creator, Will Shuster.
Their one-hour stage work asks the Godzilla-like musical question, “What would happen if Zozobra didn’t succumb to the flames but instead escaped from the pole and started terrorizing the entire town of Santa Fe?” In keeping with the family focus of the long-running event, children play a major role in Zozobra: The Revenge , which its creators hope will be scary in that just-right proportion kids love. Preston’s first draft of the text scared Illick too, but in a way he hadn’t intended. It started with two of the major characters — Elena, a Hispanic girl of around age 12, and Will, an Anglo boy of around 10 — who were skateboarding at the park downtown.
“I did a bunch of research because I don’t know anything about skateboarding,” Preston said, “but I wanted the kids to be doing something that Santa Fe kids do. When Joe saw the first iteration of the lyrics, he said, ‘It’s a great idea, but I have to be honest with you. I don’t know any really good singers who know how to skateboard, and we don’t want anyone falling down on stage.
’” Preston’s revision ties more gracefully to the plot. Will, Elena, and P’oe — an Indigenous woman in her mid-20s — are toasting marshmallows on a late summer evening in Hyde Park and Will’s catches on fire. It’s not a problem, though.
“I like it burnt,” Will explains. Since nothing goes better with campfire marshmallows than music, Elena suggests they sing an old Spanish song she knows, “El Tecolotito,” about an owl who can’t go to the dance because he doesn’t have any shoes. “This is an interactive opera,” Illick says, “with the audience invited at several times to participate in different ways.
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Within five minutes of the piece starting, everyone has a chance to sing that song. Later on, they’ll have an opportunity to sing an English song.” (The texts will be printed in the event programs.
) As the song ends, Zozobra is heard approaching. “I’ve had a long journey down from the mountains,” it sings. “I’m hungry! I’m starving for human happiness! Come on Santa Fe, come on Santa Fe.
This time I’m ready, I’m ready, ready for you!” P’oe, Will, and Elena flee as the scene changes to the Santa Fe Plaza, where The Mayor is addressing the panicked crowd from the bandstand. Zozobra has been spotted all over town, in preparation for stealing the children and turning them into an army of Gloomies to do his bidding. The Mayor proclaims that the situation is under control.
After all, he has an official proclamation, “stamped, signed, sealed, and sworn,” telling Zozobra to go away. “It’s no commentary on the present political situation in Santa Fe,” Preston says, “but I thought we needed a mayor who’s pretty absurd and ineffectual. You just need some humor, right?” After spirited razzing by the residents, The Mayor comes up with Plan B.
¡Una gran fiesta!: A big party thrown in Zozobra’s honor, which the malefactor won’t be able to resist attending and where it can be captured and dispatched forever. It works, drawing Zozobra to the festivities in Fort Marcy Park. Everything is jolly at first, but then Zozobra turns all the children into his Gloomies and orders them to wreak havoc on Santa Fe.
As the curtain falls, all seems lost ...
As if out of nowhere, Elena steps in front of the curtain, to see whether she can summon enough spirit from the audience to launch a counterattack. Can she succeed? Will the Fire Spirit arrive in time and have enough power to save the children and the city? Only those who attend Zozobra, The Revenge will know for sure. What we do know with certainty is that Zozobra debuted a century ago, in Shuster’s backyard and at a height of a mere five feet.
The only spectators were friends associated with Los Cinco Pintores, an artists’ collective consisting of Fremont Ellis, Walter Mruk, Jozef Bakos, and Willard Nash, in addition to Shuster. Zozobra: The Revenge The rules of the collective were simple: If anyone sold something, the proceeds would be split equally among the five members. In December 1923 Shuster sold a painting and suggested an alternative — a celebratory dinner at La Fonda, whose fancy new building had opened a year earlier.
(It’s the one that still stands on the corner of the plaza.) It wasn’t very celebratory, however, as the other artists insisted on voicing their complaints, doubts, and fears. Finally fed up, Shuster tore up some drawing paper and had everyone write their “glooms” on the pieces.
He piled them up on a plate in the middle of the table and lit them on fire. In the best frontier tradition, justice was swift and simple. Los Cinco conflagrators were immediately kicked out of the inn.
The next spring Shuster saw a Good Friday celebration in Mexico during which a life-sized effigy of Judas was burned up in the town square while the residents laughed and cursed. In his program notes for Zozobra: The Revenge , Preston writes: “[Shuster] already had the notion of burning up worries, anxieties and glooms in a kind of renewal ceremony, and now he had the vessel: an effigy stuffed with them. He dreamed up a tuxedo-clad monster named Zozobra.
The name comes from the Spanish verb zozobrar , which means to be worried, anxious, agitated, or full of anguish.” Illick and Preston represent a continuation of the long tradition of Los Cinco Pintores, as 21st- century creative artists who have found inspiration in northern New Mexico. Both have made Santa Fe their primary home for many years and have contributed significantly to the cultural fabric of the city.
Illick is best known in Santa Fe as an engaging speaker on musical topics and for his tenure as Performance Santa Fe’s executive and artistic director from 2007 to 2017. His outside-area-code-505 credits are also extensive, including service as the music director and artistic director of the Fort Worth Opera from 2002 to 2022 and the Lake George Opera (now Opera Saratoga in Saratoga Springs, New York) from 1994 to 1998. He studied composition and piano at London’s Royal College of Music and has written nine music-theater works, including a commission from the Santa Fe Opera, UnShakeable , which received more than 150 performances throughout New Mexico and southern Colorado.
While this is Preston’s theatrical debut, he has abundant personal and professional qualifications for the task. “I’ve always been an opera fan. I love opera, especially Italian opera,” he says, pointing out that a piece such as Tosca , with its “horrifying, violent, and disturbing plot,” is closely akin to a thriller novel.
That’s one of Preston’s specialties — he’s particularly well known for two series of thrillers co-written with Lincoln Child, the first focused on FBI Special Agent Pendergast and the second on Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Gideon Crew. “I remember the first time I went to Zozobra, which must have been 35 years ago,” he says. “I looked around and thought, ‘My God, this is the first event I’ve been to in Santa Fe where the entire town was here.
’ Our intent with Zozobra: The Revenge is that it’s for the families, for all Santa Feans.” The performances, which will be conducted by Illick and staged by director-choreographer John de los Santos, feature a 12-member orchestra, a children’s chorus of 12, an adult chorus of 12, and seven soloists. Two former Santa Fe Opera apprentices, mezzo-soprano Sarah Saturnino and baritone Spencer Reichman, are Elena and Zozobra, respectively.
Zaharra Blue Sky is P’oe, Aidan Peralta is Will, and Joseph McBrayer is The Mayor. In a unique twist, the Fire Spirit will be danced by 15-year-old Israel Valencia, restoring Shuster’s original concept that the character would be an adolescent boy, and voiced simultaneously by soprano Amy Owens and baritone Edmund Connolly..
