From Newsday, March 2004

Strange but true: Many opera-lovers resist the idea that the form might (gasp!) convey meaning. Witness the ruckus over soprano Deborah Voigt's dismissal from a London production for which her full figure was deemed unsuitable. The commotion speaks to fundamental issues about the conflicting claims of music and drama.

Composers and directors have always sought out dramatically convincing performers, as the letters of Verdi and others show. And opera has always entailed more than pretty sounds, triggering uprisings (Verdi), scandal (Wagner) and all manner of heady concerns.

So the "tragicomedy for musical theater" set to premiere at The Kitchen, The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, may be less unusual than it first seems. True, mainstream opera tends to stress the music, with visual and dramatic elements perceived as secondary. The Slug Bearers, however, brings together—on equal footing—the images and words of cartoonist Ben Katchor (The Jew of New York and Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer) and the music of Mark Mulcahy (former lead singer for Miracle Legion and Polaris).

Just as Katchor's picture-stories probe the layers of urban detritus, The Slug Bearers deals in technological archaeology. The title refers to the lead weights used to increase the heft of small appliances and the people who manufacture them. "There is this trend toward the immaterial: printed circuitry, digital devices," Katchor explained in a gloriously archaic Brooklyn accent. "At the same time, people are bigger than they used to be."

The Slug Bearers centers on a philanthropist's daughter and a lover of appliance pamphlets ("consumer fiction") who seek to enlighten exploited workers on the "factory island" where these miniaturized devices are manufactured. The show is scored for a rock band augmented with brass, mandolin and accordion, and the staging features Katchor's drawings as backdrops and animations. His only previous opera, 1999's The Carbon Copy Building, with music by Bang on a Can, received an Obie Award.

Katchor has a modest collaborator in Mulcahy. "I've never written an opera before," the latter said, sounding spooked by the notion. "I'm in charge of the music, but it's part of the greater whole." A soulful vocalist who sings several roles in the opera, he counts among his admirers novelist Nick Hornby, who chose Mulcahy's "Hey Self Defeater" as one of his 31 favorite cuts in Songbook.

Mulcahy let out a yelp upon learning that a demo of his score was already circulating, but even in raw form, his music has a heartfelt directness that suits the whimsy and oblique sentimentality of Katchor's text.

Says Katchor: "To find someone who could bring out the music of human speech without making it feel tremendously artificial, that's the kind of composer I was gravitating toward."

Visit www.katchor.com and www.mezzotint.com.