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    American Idol-style competition

    A Boston Legal opera, Voir Dire, takes top spot in Opera Vista competition

    Joel Luks
    Mar 21, 2011 | 2:26 pm
    • Matthew Peterson's "Voir Dire" took first place. Meaning to "speak the truth,"this "Boston Legal" courtroom opera depicts ridiculous custody battles andviolent crimes, using real transcripts as inspiration.
    • Second-place winner, Alberto Garcia Demestres "Il Sequestro," aims to illustratesociety's obsession with violence.

    The 2011 Opera Vista Festival final round allowed four composers one last chance to make a case for their work, hoping to earn a spot in the company's 2011-2012 season. Given the popularity of Opera Vista, the work will receive great exposure.

    So it wasn't surprising that this American Idol-style competition drew a curious, near-capacity crowd at the Moores School of Music looking to influence the outcome, myself included.

    The panel of judges and audience, many who were repeat visitors from the semifinal round a couple of days earlier, were already familiar with the rituals surrounding the competition, although in the final round the audience was invited to ask questions and add commentary.

    I confess that I was initially puzzled by the festival's format, which called for a repeat performance of the excerpts heard at the semifinals rather than presenting something new. Logistic considerations aside — a different excerpt would mean doubling resources and rehearsal time — I thought it reasonable to gain a wider scope by experiencing a larger range.

    And doing so would have helped in making this seemingly impossible decision easier. For whom would I vote?

    But Viswa Subbaraman, Opera Vista's artistic director, had a different idea. A second sampling of the same excerpt allowed the audience and panel to concentrate on digging deeper while gaining a better perspective of the compositional approach, becoming better acquainted with the thematic material while exploring the effectiveness of the piece, with a less-is-more philosophy.

    It worked, but I wonder why they couldn't do both.

    Ultimately, it was Matthew Peterson's Voir Dire that took the first prize in the secret ballot vote of everyone present. Like his opera, Peterson appeared poised, polished and eloquent.

    "I think Matthew Peterson's Voir Dire won primarily because it told a story in a very honest way, and in doing so, it touched people's heart strings," Subbaraman said. "That is also the reason I think the audience related to it."

     Voir Dire, translated from old Anglo-Norman, means "to speak the truth." Peterson and librettist Jason Zencka — Voir Dire is their second collaboration — used real courtroom transcripts as the basis for the work, centered around trials Zencka witnessed while working as a crime reporter for the Stevens Point Journal in Wisconsin.

    The main narrative focuses on a barbaric matricide committed by 16-year-old Jeffrey Schumacher, with vignettes of other trials, including a macaw custody dispute, a rape and arrests, with the orchestra conductor playing the role of judge. At the end, all these ancillary characters become the jury for the opera's primary storyline.

    A Boston Legal opera, Peterson's work had it all: A creative and intriguing foundation, engaging emotional content, familiar tonal language yet clearly embedded in modernism and an innovative approach while displaying an open disposition to work with constructive criticism from a stage director. His work, after all, is demanding.

    And Houston is no stranger to either courtroom drama or art that alludes to it. If Houston Grand Opera's recent production of Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking is any indication of the curiosity about legal matters, the production has the potential to draw interest.

    Peterson, who initially addressed the audience in a composed theatrical, almost calculated and rehearsed fashion, appeared real and personable and earned my vote. But it was Spanish composer Alberto García Demestres's work that I really wanted to champion because he spoke from the heart and without any inhibitions,. He earned second place.

    "Other than the winning opera, I have to say that I would love to see Alberto García Demestres' opera, Il Sequestro staged," Subbaraman said. "He is definitely a composer with an encyclopedic knowledge of opera and I think it would give a good stage director an interesting challenge."

    Much like his opera, Demestres is full of emotion.

    Demestres has stronger roots in operatic tradition, utilizing almost a Straussian sound. A heart attack caused the composer to abandon a commission based on the 1,001 Arabian Nights to address issues of society's complacency with violence, real and imagined.

     Il Sequestro takes place inside a child's dream, where the audience, representing a sadistic society hungry for real and brutal violence, watches a reality show. Three kidnapped women — each symbolizing a weapon against violence — must compete in the perverse games of their attacker. Two die, one lives on.

    Be on the lookout for next year's festival. Peterson's Voir Dire will be the featured work, though I hope Opera Vista finds a way to also stage Il Sequestro.

    It would make for an ambitious program and Opera Vista is accustomed to challenges.

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    Movie Review

    'I Know What You Did Last Summer' reboot lacks energy or thrills

    Alex Bentley
    Jul 17, 2025 | 2:00 pm
    Sarah Pidgeon, Madelyn Cline and Chase Sui Wonders in I Know What You Did Last Summer
    Photo by Brook Rushton
    Sarah Pidgeon, Madelyn Cline and Chase Sui Wonders in I Know What You Did Last Summer.

    When the original I Know What You Did Last Summer came out in 1997, it was riding the coattails of Scream, which came out in 1996. Like that film, it featured hot young actors of the time, albeit with a story that was much more standard than the inventive Scream. Still, it made enough of an impact for some studio executive to think it was worth reviving nearly 30 years later with its own legacy-quel.

    In the new I Know What You Did Last Summer, a group of five high school friends — Danica (Madelyn Cline), Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Milo (Jonah Hauer-King), Teddy (Tyriq Withers), and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon) — have reunited at the engagement party for Danica and Teddy on the 4th of July. While on an impromptu trip to watch fireworks on a twisty road in the nearby hills, Teddy goofs off in the middle of the road, causing a truck to swerve and drive off the cliff.

    A year later, having sworn to each other to not speak of the accident to anybody, they start getting stalked by a mysterious person in a fisherman’s slicker carrying a hook. With Teddy’s rich father, Grant (Billy Campbell), actively trying to cover up what his son did (as well as the fallout), it’s up to the group to figure out who is coming after them and how to stop that person.

    Written and directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, and co-written by Sam Lansky, the film doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel; in fact, it barely builds something that can roll. It might just be the laziest and most incompetent attempt to capitalize on an existing piece of intellectual property. There is almost zero effort put into establishing a connection between the members of the friend group, making them feel like strangers for the entire film.

    It doesn’t help that the young male actors in the film — which grows to include Wyatt (Joshua Orpin), a new fiance for Danica — serve no purpose other than to be generically good-looking. The most impactful of the men in the film is the returning Freddie Prinze, Jr., who — along with Jennifer Love Hewitt — has his old character from the first two films shoehorned into the new story. The filmmakers undercut any good feelings from their return by giving them hardly anything to do and then having Hewitt deliver the line, “Nostalgia is overrated.”

    The film as a whole never has a sense of momentum. The inciting incident is so tame — they even attempt to save the driver before the truck goes off the cliff — that the guilt they feel and the anger of the person going after them doesn’t feel warranted. Once the attacks start, it is shocking at how low-energy the sequences are, providing no sense of suspense or thrills. The filmmakers resort to the lamest of horror movie tropes, turning the film into a paint-by-numbers affair.

    Cline (one of the stars of Netflix’s Outer Banks) and Wonders (The Studio on Apple TV+, Bodies Bodies Bodies) are the clear stars of the film, but their characters are made into inert scream queens, negating any acting talent they possess. Hauer-King, Withers, and Pidgeon don’t bring anything interesting to their characters, existing merely to have someone else for the killer to go after.

    Even the worst films can have some kind of redeeming value if you look hard enough, but the only thing I Know What You Did Last Summer has to offer is that it becomes so comically bad by the end that you can’t help but laugh at its ineptitude. Both fans of the original and fans of horror movies in general will feel cheated by the experience.

    ---

    I Know What You Did Last Summer opens in theaters on July 18.

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