In the opening scene of Complications in Sue, a new commission by Opera Philadelphia beginning its four-night run this evening, at the city’s Academy of Music, four solemn figures push a vintage black baby carriage across the stage. Long shadows loom; the vocalists portend a “world that’s full of wonder, a world that’s full of woe.” As far as birth stories go, this vignette seems to strike an Edward Gorey-esque mood, with the librettist Michael R. Jackson—a 2020 Pulitzer winner for his musical A Strange Loop—casting Death in the unlikely role of the welcome committee.

But then, a voice chirps up from a nearby aisle. “Hi! It’s my birthday!” says the cabaret legend Justin Vivian Bond, swanning through the audience in an iridescent feathered sheath and matching headpiece designed by Jonathan Anderson. A star is born—and Sue’s life, complicated as advertised, is about to unfold.

This, if not already clear, isn’t your typical opera. For that, we have Anthony Roth Costanzo to thank. When the celebrated countertenor took over as the general director and president of Opera Philadelphia in June 2024, he had to make haste on planning the company’s 50th-anniversary season. He asked Bond, his collaborator on the 2021 show Only an Octave Apart, if she had any ideas, and she proffered an already-baked title. (“Complications in Sue” was a seedlet of a concept she’d discussed with her friend Tilda Swinton, whose encouragement was swift: “‘Develop it, darling,’” Bond recounts.) Jackson, meanwhile, had separately floated his interest in working on a libretto, and Costanzo made the match.

With only a year-long runway—too short to expect a composer to take on a full-length project—the plan was to divide the opera into 10 parts, each assigned to a different composer. “It would be a kind of musical buffet,” says Jackson, “with Viv as our leitmotif.”

The result is “like one of those movies from the ’70s that has every star in it,” says Bond of the eclectic creative team. In the co-directors’ chairs are Raja Feather Kelly (a longtime Jackson collaborator) and Zack Winokur (Octave). Anderson, fresh off presenting his debut couture collection for Dior, has masterminded a suite of costumes for the leading lady, whom he’s known since college, Bond says. The roster of composers includes the Grammy-nominated Missy Mazzoli, the jazz musician Cécile McLorin Salvant, and Nico Muhly, whose prolific output crisscrosses from the Metropolitan Opera to Sufjan Stevens.

The four standout singers—Kiera Duffy, Nicholas Newton, Nicky Spence, and Rehanna Thelwell—carry the bulk of the vocal weight and handle the gestural choreography with aplomb. And the conductor, Caren Levine, is the “spitfire” holding it all together, as Winokur put it last month during a preview at the Guggenheim. “She has perfect pitch, she has a photographic memory,” and—less expected in the field but suited to this colorful work—she “swears like a sailor!”

But the architect behind this topsy-turvy story arc is decidedly Jackson, who was left to his own devices to flesh out Sue’s complications. In imagining a moment from each decade of her life, he flitted between the real and imaginary. Santa Claus, onstage with a kitsch midcentury silver tree, has a depressive meltdown. College classmates spread rumors about Sue (rhinoplasty!) as she picnics in a Brideshead Revisited–inspired trench coat. A scene from inside Sue’s imagination manifests as a TV newsroom; she later slips into a trippy spiral-print caftan with oversize sleeves that read “DOOM”—an algorithmic malaise. By the time Sue turns up in a retirement community, her neighbor with a kiddie pool and semi-deflated flamingo sings, “Nothing will soothe my soul…” in three plaintive rounds. And then: “...but to click and to scroll.”

Complications manages to thread this needle between the topical and the timeless. A line from that retiree’s aria—“Free speech is $7 a month, and I pay it to the richest man in the world”—elicits uneasy laughter. “I write in that place of ambivalence and ambiguity,” Jackson says. “To me, what’s thrilling is that the music of opera can really put a shiny box around certain ideas that might, in another medium, go in one ear and out the other.”

He calls it “delicious” to hear his text set to such a sonic tapestry, though one unexpected hangup is the occasional inconvenient earworm. “I don’t necessarily want to be waking up to a loop of, ‘There is only death in algorithms, there is only death and algorithms, there is only death in algorithms,’” he trills in the music’s 7/8 meter. “But it happens!”

Bond as 10-year-old Sue in Complications in Sue, directed by Raja Feather Kelly and Zack Winokur.

Photo: Steven Pisano

Muhly, who composed the opera’s final section, has special praise for Jackson’s libretto. “The rhythm of the text was incredibly generous—I didn’t change anything,” he says. During the creation process, the composers were essentially set to play a version of the Surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse. “I was given a one-sentence-per-scene synopsis, with the idea that we didn’t ever get to read other scenes,” Muhly explains. (Still, he admits with a laugh, “a lot of us were calling each other, being like, ‘Girl, what are you doing?’”) He approached the closing chapter with a simultaneous sense of fading out and coming into view; one imagines that Death, here basking in the lush soundscape, might be waiting to christen the next complicated life.

“I do think that opera was created as a popular art,” says Bond, underscoring the value of “contemporary operas that speak to what’s going on in the world today.” She remembers seeing Nixon in China by John Adams, with a libretto by Alice Goodman, as a young artist working at the Kennedy Center (when it was “still the Kennedy Center,” she adds pointedly). Jackson had a similar experience during grad school with Jackie O, by the composer Michael Daugherty and the librettist Wayne Koestenbaum. “That one just knocked my socks off because it had a different kind of musical idiom than I’d ever heard in opera, and it had a humor to it.”

Complications also paves a new way forward, with a composite structure—and smaller-scale commissions—that can bring in newer composers alongside in-demand mid-career artists. “There are few things like this,” Muhly says, “but I think there should be more things like this.” To have a charismatic muse like Bond at the center—dressed in a Jonathan Anderson bubble dress, no less—is only icing on the cake.

The world premiere production of Complications in Sue runs through Sunday, February 8.