A little-known piece of Iowa history is coming to the stage in a one-night-only opera from the Crescendo Children’s Choir.
Child and adult singers, including professional opera stars, will perform Orphan Train to Iowa: For the Love of Pete on Saturday, June 18 at 7:30 p.m. in the Coralville Center for the Performing Arts.
The original opera is based on Ethel Barker’s novel For the Love of Pete: An Orphan Train Story.
Donald and Nancy Macfarlane, a married couple who met singing in a Philadelphia church choir, bumped into Barker, an Iowa City-based writer, at a party and they got to talking about Barker’s book.
They eventually decided to commission Barker to turn her story into an opera.
“I said, ‘Well can you write the libretto?’” said Donald Macfarlane, the stage director. “And she said, ‘Well yes,’ and then she thought on it and said, ‘What’s a libretto?’”
Barker collaborated with Donald and Nancy Macfarlane to convert her story into songs, and Kevin Allen, a composer from Chicago, wrote the music.
The play follows Pete and his friends Rosie and Iris, who are sisters. The three travel from New York to Iowa, where they are placed with families.
The orphan train was a real system that placed children from places like New York and Boston with rural families in a time before federal programs for orphaned children. According to the Social Welfare History Project, between 1854 and 1929 an estimated 200,000 children were moved across the country. The concept was invented by Charles Loring Brace, a minister who thought the orphanages were overcrowded and that children would benefit from family life. Brace thought this would be mutually beneficial to families who needed extra hands to tend their farm.
There are some dark elements of this history, as the families were not vetted by any modern standard and some adoptees were only looking for free labor. Additionally, not all children on the orphan trains were actually orphaned.
The opera touches on these elements. For example, the character Old Man Olson wants to adopt Pete just to have him work, and doesn’t care about him emotionally. The play also shows the sisters Rosie and Iris being separated from each other.
“Although it’s sort of written for young teenagers … they’re dealing with very real, very human issues,” Donald said of the book. “And when you start to explore very real, very human issues, the various characters in the book sort of came alive to us, and it’s those characters that actually drove it.”
Ultimately, though, Allen says it’s an uplifting story.
With professional talent coming from out of the state, a full orchestra, two acts, and an original libretto, Nancy Macfarlane, Crescendo’s founder and artistic director, said this production has grown beyond their imagination.
“This became much bigger than anything I ever planned,” she said. And suddenly we’ve got people coming from all over to sing the roles and it is a great deal larger than anything I’ve ever done before.”
It’s also become a family event for Donald and Nancy Macfarlane. Their daughter is an opera singer in Chicago who will be singing in the show and their son who performs in the Chicago Lyric Opera orchestra will be playing violin. Donald said they are also planning to squeeze eight of their nine grandchildren on stage.
Nancy said she hopes people appreciate that the opera tells an original story based on Iowa’s history.
“It was really something, there was no foster care, there was no anything in those years, and it was I think it ran for 70 some years,” she said. “The train didn’t stop until I believe it’s 1929. So it was really a monumental thing and a lot of people in the Midwest are related to people that did ride the orphan train.”
Allen said he hopes Orphan Train to Iowa can serve as an entry point for people who haven’t seen opera before.
“I’m quite confident they will be probably more first time opera-goers in this production, I’m sure,” Allen said. “And for that, I hope that it will be a very easy way into this kind of repertoire because it’s an American story.”
Attendees can find information about tickets for Saturday’s show through the Coralville Center for the Performing Arts website.
