Aurelia Butler

Ailyn Pérez didn’t get a chance to see the billboards in New York: the Metropolitan Opera’s advertisements for its coming season, featuring a portrait of her in spectral whites, her eyes closed as she comes face to face with a butterfly.She had been too busy appearing at San Francisco Opera’s centennial concert, rushing to Munich to sing Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello” and flying to Santa Fe to star in Dvorak’s “Rusalka.” On the outdoor stage in New Mexico, she didn’t encounter any butterflies, but she did swallow an insect.“I started coughing,” Pérez, 44, said with a laugh during an interview last month on the grounds of Santa Fe Opera. “But this is my third opera here, and I’ve learned that you deal with the elements.”Friends have sent her photos of the New York billboards, which are a first for her. She has been performing at the Met since 2015 — blossoming into a soprano of lush vocal beauty, dramatic acuity and commanding presence — but there hasn’t been a new production built around her until this season, when Daniel Catán’s “Florencia en el Amazonas” receives its company premiere.“I haven’t posted any of the photos, because I don’t want to post something and then it’s gone,” Pérez said. “But I see it, and I just think, Wow, I’ve always wanted this, and I didn’t know it would be this role. It blows my mind.”She is excited not only by the career milestone, but also by what “Florencia” means for the Met. Catán’s 1996 opera — a Gabriel García Márquez-inspired story of a diva’s homecoming, opening Nov. 16 — is part of a wave of contemporary works joining the repertory there. More remarkably, it is the house’s first Spanish-language show. And at its heart is Pérez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants.Ushering in this era of the Met’s history is, she said, “such an honor.” To her colleagues, though, especially Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the company’s music director, who is conducting “Florencia,” this moment is well-deserved for one of the house’s leading sopranos.“We go back to the Salzburg Festival over a decade ago,” Nézet-Séguin said of his relationship with Pérez. “And we’ve been regularly making music together. The generosity of the person comes through in every vocal performance that she gives. The refinement, the quality of the voice, the generosity of the heart — it’s what makes her exceptional.”Pérez, whose repertoire includes both lyric and dramatic roles, starred in “Rusalka” at the Santa Fe Opera this summer. Curtis BrownPérez grew up in Chicago, where her parents, both from towns near Guadalajara, Mexico, met. She started school on the South Side, but at 6 moved to the suburb of Elk Grove Village. There, she made a point of speaking English in the classroom despite Spanish being the default language at home.“It was a time where, if you spoke Spanish, you had E.S.L. classes, which I’m sure was the system’s way of caring,” Pérez said, “but it also hindered a group of students from learning with everyone else.”Making friends was difficult. Her homemade ham sandwiches came with avocado and jalapeño, which she said wasn’t good for trading at lunch. There was also the fact that she looked different from other children.But her Elk Grove elementary school was where she first took music classes. The instructor was playful, teaching rhythm and tempo with a wink and farting noises. “This is meant to be fun,” Pérez remembered thinking. She rented a recorder, then took up the cello to join the orchestra and flute to be in the band.In high school, she started voice lessons because they were required for her to take part in the musical. At her first session, the teacher handed her some sheet music and asked her to sing. She felt confident about breathing because of her experience on flute, and was able to sight-read the score. “He looked at me like, ‘Who are you?’” Pérez recalled. She knew virtually nothing about opera but was breezing through the famous Puccini aria “O mio babbino caro.”In the end, she got to perform in musicals — as Sarah in “Guys and Dolls,” and as Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes” — but her interest was quickly overtaken by opera. Pérez checked out CDs from the library and made her way through the classic recordings of Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Mirella Freni and Montserrat Caballé. She brought a recording of “La Traviata” to her teacher and asked why the music made her cry.She adored Renée Fleming, whom she got to meet after a recital in Chicago. The great soprano told her that she had “nice cheekbones,” to which she replied, “Oh my God, thank you.” But, more important, that concert was the moment, Pérez said, that she “saw someone do the thing” of singing.Pérez had still not been to an opera. That wouldn’t happen until she saw Gounod’s “Faust” — starring a student Lawrence Brownlee — at Indiana University Bloomington. She studied there because, she was told, Met singers were on the faculty. Her teachers included the sopranos Martina Arroyo and Virginia Zeani, who originated the role of Blanche in Poulenc’s “Dialogues des Carmélites,” which Pérez would go on to perform at the Met.She continued her studies at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia, finishing there in 2006. Two years later, she was onstage in Salzburg, performing alongside the tenor Rolando Villazón, under Nézet-Séguin’s baton, in Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette.” After that prestigious debut, her arrival at the Met didn’t come until 2015, when she sang Micaëla in a revival of “Carmen.”“A confident, forthright presence in a role that can fade into merely demure, Ms. Pérez has a penetrating, settled voice,” Zachary Woolfe wrote of that night in The New York Times. “Her tone may not be sumptuous, but it’s clear and articulate, and she uses it with intelligence and a sense of purpose.”Pérez as Micaëla in “Carmen” at the Met: “A confident, forthright presence in a role that can fade into merely demure,” the Times critic wrote.Marty Sohl/Met OperaPérez could hardly be accused of not having a sumptuous voice today. Her sound has become richer, while remaining nimble enough for a spinto repertoire encompassing both lyric and dramatic roles; she can inspire awe as the Contessa in “Le Nozze di Figaro” one night and as the doomed nymph of “Rusalka” the next.Her career at the Met has been representative of that range, in part because she is a favorite of Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “Each season, she has grown and developed, and quite frankly gotten better and better,” he said. “She very convincingly becomes the characters whom she’s portraying, but above all her voice is absolutely beautiful.”In spring 2020, Pérez was set to sing in “Simon Boccanegra” at the Met, but the season was cut short by the pandemic. “The closure really knocked me out,” she said. It helped — a lot — that by then she had met Soloman Howard.They had been introduced in Santa Fe. In 2016, Pérez starred as Juliette in “Roméo,” and her colleagues included Howard, a bass-baritone, as the duke. “He took my breath away,” she said. “He’s such a brilliant artist and connector. Whether speaking or singing, the presence brings something that draws people in but also delivers this power. I knew that his calling in life would be big.”It wasn’t until 2019, though, that they began dating. They attended the Vienna Opera Ball together, and traveled to see each other perform. Once the pandemic hit, they sheltered together in Chicago. Where she was despondent, he was resourceful. He rounded up equipment for them to start recording music at home.At one point, Santa Fe Opera asked Pérez to tape herself singing “Song to the Moon” from “Rusalka,” and Howard said, “‘We are going to make a video,’” she recalled. “He cut stars out of foil and pinned them on the drapes. He got a boulder from a local Home Goods store. I was like the Little Mermaid on the rock, and that was all him.”When live opera resumed, Pérez reopened the Met’s auditorium as the soprano soloist in Verdi’s Requiem, to observe the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. She doesn’t really remember that night — “I was out of my body” — but others do. Gelb, who said, “You can’t fake Verdi,” remembered her sounding “absolutely magnificent.” Nézet-Séguin, called it “a performance for the ages.”Howard, Pérez said, gave her something to hope for in the months leading up to that Requiem. She referred to him as “mi vida” — “my life.” Out and about in the opera world, they are something of a power couple, beloved and difficult to miss in their red-carpet-ready style. (“That’s all Soloman.”) Days after the opening night of “Rusalka” in Santa Fe, they got married.The ceremony was small and private. A larger celebration will come, to be planned in the spaces between two peripatetic careers — which will soon bring Pérez back to the Met for “Florencia” rehearsals.It’s an opera that Gelb has long wanted to bring to the house; he was just waiting, he said, for the right star. And he knew that his hope for Pérez had paid off last season when, during the run of “Carmélites,” he asked her to sing Florencia’s final aria for the Met board on only a day’s notice. She delivered it, he added, “with so much beauty and conviction, she had the board sort of swooning along with her.”In Santa Fe, Pérez spoke about the role with the depth of a literary thinker, but acknowledged that she will have to see what the director, Mary Zimmerman, comes up with for the production. She is certain, at least, of the confidence she is bringing to “Florencia,” a product of the years leading up to this moment.“I don’t feel like a beginner anymore,” Pérez said. “I’m not wondering what happens next. Now, I can really look back and see it all.” More

In 1996, the police in Jamaica mistook Buffett for a drug smuggler after he landed his seaplane with the singer Bono and others on board and opened fire on it.Jimmy Buffett’s life evokes images of boozy chill-outs by the beach and a certain carefree calm, but in 1996 the singer’s seaplane came under a hail of gunfire in a dramatic encounter with the Jamaican authorities that inspired a song.Buffett’s song “Jamaica Mistaica” is a laid-back account of a dramatic near-death experience in which his plane, Hemisphere Dancer, was mistaken by the Jamaican authorities for a drug-smuggling aircraft.It’s one of the many tales that have resurfaced after his death on Friday.While on tour on Jan. 16, 1996, Buffett, an avid pilot, had just landed at an airport in Negril, Jamaica, accompanied by Paul David Hewson, better known as Bono, of the band U2, when a sudden burst of shots rang out, according to one of Buffett’s Margaritaville websites.“We flew the plane in, got off, and as the plane took off to go get fuel, we were surrounded by a Jamaican S.W.A.T. team,” Buffett said in a 1996 Rolling Stone interview. “I thought it was a joke until I heard the gunfire.”As Bono recalled, according to Radio Margaritaville: “These boys were shooting all over the place. I felt as if we were in the middle of a James Bond movie.”“I honestly thought we were all going to die,” he added.Also on board the HU-16 Grumman Albatross plane was Bono’s wife, Ali, their two young children, and Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records.Later that year, Buffett released his album “Banana Wind,” in which he recounts the story on “Jamaica Mistaica”:Just about to lose my temper as I endeavored to explainWe had only come for chicken we were not a ganja planeWell, you should have seen their faces when they finally realizedWe were not some coked-up cowboy sporting guns and alibis.“Like all things, it made for a good song,” Buffett told The Spokesman-Review in a 1996 interview.“I know that there are times in my life where I probably should have been shot at for a lot worse behavior,” he added. “But on this particular instance, I was innocent. Not even a spliff.”The plane, now an artifact of the Buffett universe, was struck by bullets but nobody was hurt.He later received an apology from the Jamaican government, according to an MTV News report at the time.“Some people said, ‘God, you could have sued them, you could have sued the government,’” Buffett said in The Spokesman-Review interview. “But I went, ‘No, it’s probably karma. We’re even now.’” More

There was wistfulness behind party tunes like “Margaritaville.” Buffett helped listeners feel like they’d earned the good times just by holding on.Jimmy Buffett built a pop-culture empire on the daydream of “wastin’ away again in Margaritaville”: just hanging out on a tropical beach, drink in hand, a little wistful but utterly relaxed. The empire’s cornerstone was his 1977 hit “Margaritaville,” a catalog of minor mishaps — a misplaced saltshaker, a cut foot — that were all easily soothed with “that frozen concoction.”It’s a countryish song with south-of-the border touches like marimba and flutes, a style jovially summed up as “Gulf and Western.” It’s a resort-town fantasy of creature comforts close at hand and, of course, it’s a drinking song. Buffett leveraged it into a major brand for restaurants, resorts, clothing, food and drink, as well as a perpetual singalong on his robust touring circuit, where his devoted fans — the Parrot Heads — gathered eagerly in their Hawaiian shirts.Buffett cannily marketed his good-timey image; it made him a billionaire. He came up with wry song premises like the one behind “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” which starts as the lament of an attempted vegetarian who can’t resist carnivorous impulses. He brought jokey wordplay to his song and album titles and his band name, the Coral Reefers, and he summed up his career with the boxed-set title “Boats, Beaches, Bars and Ballads.” Country singers like Kenny Chesney, Alan Jackson and Zac Brown latched on to his seaside-and-booze themes and acknowledged his influence by sharing duets with him.But Buffett’s songwriting wasn’t all smiley and one-dimensional. “If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane,” he sang in “Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes.” He wrote about characters with sadder-but-wiser back stories, like the 86-year-old who had lost his wife and son in wartime in “He Went to Paris,” the hapless robber in “The Great Filling Station Holdup” and the sometime smuggler in “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” who shrugs, “I feel like I’ve drowned, gonna head uptown.”As a conservationist Buffett also, humorously or humbly, contemplated the power and beauty of Nature in songs like “Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season”; its narrator writes a song as a storm moves in, but also worries, “I can’t run at this pace very long.” In “Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On,” from his 2006 album “Take the Weather With You,” the singer looked back on what Hurricane Katrina had done to New Orleans.The backdrop to Buffett’s party tunes is often one of relief, not entitlement. He sings about mistakes, regrets, work, longing, nostalgia and, beginning decades ago, the inevitability of aging: “I can see the day when my hair’s full gray/And I finally disappear,” he sang on his 1983 song “One Particular Harbour,” a staple of his live sets.So the drinks and parties and vacations and boat trips, or finally being able to settle down in that place by the beach, became consolations for past troubles — even if those troubles were self-made. Buffett helped listeners feel like they’d earned the good times just by holding on long enough to enjoy them. The party was justified — reason enough to order another round. More

With songs like “Margaritaville” and “Fins,” he became a folk hero to fans known as Parrot Heads. He also became a millionaire hundreds of times over.Jimmy Buffett, the singer, songwriter, author, sailor and entrepreneur whose roguish brand of island escapism on hits like “Margaritaville” and “Fins” made him something of a latter-day folk hero, especially among his devoted following of so-called Parrot Heads, died on Friday. He was 76. His death was announced in a statement on his website. The statement did not say where he died or specify a cause. Peopled with pirates, smugglers, beach bums and barflies, Mr. Buffett’s genial, self-deprecating songs conjured a world of sun, saltwater and nonstop parties animated by the calypso country-rock of his limber Coral Reefer Band. His live shows abounded with singalong anthems and festive tropical iconography, making him a perennial draw on the summer concert circuit, where he built an ardent fan base akin to the Grateful Dead’s Dead Heads.Mr. Buffett found success primarily with albums. He enjoyed only a few years on the pop singles chart, with “Margaritaville,” his 1977 breakthrough hit and only single to reach the pop Top 10.“I blew out my flip-flop/Stepped on a pop-top/Cut my heel, had to cruise on back home,” he sang woozily to the song’s lilting Caribbean rhythms. “But there’s booze in the blender/And soon it will render/That frozen concoction that helps me hang on.”Mr. Buffett’s music was often described as “Gulf and western,” a nod to his fusion of laid-back twang and island-themed lyrics, as well as a play on the conglomerate name Gulf and Western, the former parent of Paramount Pictures, among other companies.His songs tended to be of two main types: wistful ballads like “Come Monday” and “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” and clever up-tempo numbers like “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” Some were both, like “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” a 1978 homage to Mr. Buffett’s seafaring grandfather, written with the producer Norbert Putnam.“I’m just a son of a son, son of a son/Son of a son of a sailor,” he sang. “The sea’s in my veins, my tradition remains/I’m just glad I don’t live in a trailer.”The Caribbean and the Gulf Coast were Mr. Buffett’s muses, and nowhere more so than Key West in Florida. He first visited the island at the urging of Jerry Jeff Walker, his sometime songwriting and drinking partner, after a gig fell through in Miami in the early ’70s.“When I found Key West and the Caribbean, I wasn’t really successful yet,” Mr. Buffett said in a 1989 interview with The Washington Post. “But I found a lifestyle, and I knew that whatever I did would have to work around my lifestyle.”Mr. Buffett had an affinity for sailing, and his songwriting was greatly influenced by his laid-back life in Key West.Gems/Redferns, via Getty ImagesThe locales provided Mr. Buffett with more than just a breezy, sailing life and grist for his songwriting. They were also the impetus for the creation of a tropical-themed business empire that included a restaurant franchise, a hotel chain and boutique tequila, T-shirt and footwear lines, all of which made him a millionaire hundreds of times over.“I’ve done a bit of smugglin’, and I’ve run my share of grass,” Mr. Buffett sang of his early days trafficking marijuana in the Florida Keys in “A Pirate Looks at Forty.”“I made enough money to buy Miami,” he went on, alluding to his subsequent entrepreneurial pursuits. “But I pissed it away so fast/Never meant to last/Never meant to last.”His claim to squandering his wealth notwithstanding, Mr. Buffett proved to be a shrewd manager of his considerable fortune; in 2023, Forbes estimated his net worth at $1 billion.“If Mr. Buffett is a pirate, to borrow one of his favorite images, it is hardly because of his days palling around with dope smugglers in the Caribbean,” the critic Anthony DeCurtis wrote in a 1999 essay for The New York Times. “He is a pirate in the way that Bill Gates and Donald Trump have styled themselves, as plundering rebels, visionary artists of the deal, not bound by the societal restrictions meant for smaller, more careful men.”(The comparison to Mr. Trump here is strictly economic; Mr. Buffett was a Democrat.)Mr. Buffett was also an accomplished author, one of only six writers, along with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and William Styron, to top both The Times’s fiction and nonfiction best-seller lists. By the time he wrote “Tales from Margaritaville” (1989), the first of his three No. 1 best sellers, he had abandoned the hedonistic lifestyle he had previously embraced.“I could wind up like a lot of my friends did, burned out or dead, or redirect the energy,” he told The Washington Post in 1989. “I’m not old, but I’m getting older. That period of my life is over. It was fun — all that hard drinking, hard drugging. No apologies.”“I still have a very happy life,” he went on. “I just don’t do the things I used to do.”Mr. Buffett in 1991. “Margaritaville,” his blockbuster hit, rocketed him to fame in 1977.Tim Mosenfelder/ImageDirect, via Getty ImagesJames William Buffett was born on Dec. 25, 1946, in Pascagoula, Miss., one of three children of Mary Loraine (Peets) and James Delaney Buffett Jr. Both of his parents were longtime employees of the Alabama Drydock and Shipbuilding Company. His father was a manager of government contracts, and his mother, known simply as Peets, was an assistant director of industrial relations.Jimmy was raised Roman Catholic in Mobile, Ala., where he took up the trombone in elementary school, at St. Ignatius Catholic School. He went to high school at another Catholic institution in Mobile, the McGill Institute.In 1964 he enrolled in classes at Auburn University. He flunked out and later attended the University of Southern Mississippi and began performing in local nightclubs. He graduated with a degree in history in 1969, before moving to the French Quarter of New Orleans and playing in a cover band on Bourbon Street.In 1970 he moved to Nashville, hoping to make it as a country singer while working as a journalist for Billboard. (Mr. Buffett was credited with having broken the story about the disbanding of the pioneering bluegrass duo Flatt and Scruggs.) “Down to Earth,” his debut album, was released on Andy Williams’s Barnaby label that year. It sold 324 copies.Mr. Buffett’s second album for Barnaby, “High Cumberland Jubilee,” went unreleased until 1976, long after he had signed with ABC-Dunhill and recorded “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean,” released in 1973 and featuring the debauched party anthem “Why Don’t We Get Drunk.”Mr. Buffett had a fondness for puns, as witnessed by “A White Sport Coat,” an album title inspired by the song “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation),” a 1957 pop-crossover hit for the country singer Marty Robbins. Another album was called “Last Mango in Paris.”The “Margaritaville” restaurant and hotel chains are part of the tropical-themed business empire that Mr. Buffett built.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesMr. Buffett’s 1974 release “Living and Dying in ¾ Time” included a version of the comedian Lord Buckley’s “God’s Own Drunk.” “Come Monday,” a lovelorn track from the record, became his first Top 40 hit.“A1A” (also from 1974) was named for the oceanfront highway that runs along Florida’s Atlantic coastline. The album was Mr. Buffett’s first to contain references to Key West and maritime life, but it was 1977’s platinum-selling “Changes in Attitudes, Changes in Latitudes,” with the blockbuster hit “Margaritaville,” that finally catapulted him to stardom. “Fins,” another major single, was released in 1979.A series of popular releases followed, culminating in 1985 with “Songs You Know By Heart,” a compilation of Mr. Buffett’s most beloved songs to date. The record became the best-selling album of his career.Mr. Buffett also opened the first of his many “Margaritaville” stores in 1985. That was the year that the former Eagles bassist Timothy B. Schmit, then a member of the Coral Reefer Band, coined the term Parrot Heads to describe Mr. Buffett’s staunch legion of fans, the bulk of whom were baby boomers.A supporter of conservationist causes, Mr. Buffett moved away from the Keys in the late ’70s because of the area’s increasing commercialization. He initially relocated to Aspen, Colo., before making his home on St. Barts in the Caribbean. He also had houses in Palm Beach, Fla., and Sag Harbor, on eastern Long Island.In addition to touring and recording, activities he pursued into the 2020s, Mr. Buffett wrote music for movies like “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Urban Cowboy.” He also appeared in movies and television shows, including “Rancho Deluxe,” “Jurassic World” and the “Hawaii Five-O” revival in the 2010s, where he starred as the helicopter pilot Frank Bama, a character from his best-selling 1992 novel, “Where Is Joe Merchant?”Mr. Buffett favored wordplay in the names of his songs and albums, like “Last Mango in Paris” and “Jamaica Mistaica,” a sendup song about an incident that involved Jamaican authorities mistakenly shooting at one of his planes.Aaron Richter for The New York Times An avid pilot, Mr. Buffett owned several aircraft and often flew himself to his shows. In 1994 he crashed one of his airplanes in waters near Nantucket, Mass., while taking off. He survived the accident, after swimming to safety, with only minor injuries.In 1996 another of Mr. Buffett’s planes, Hemisphere Dancer, was shot at by the Jamaican police, who suspected the craft was being used to smuggle marijuana. On board the airplane, which sustained little damage, were U2’s Bono; Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records; and Mr. Buffett’s wife and two daughters. The Jamaican authorities later admitted the incident was a case of mistaken identity, inspiring Mr. Buffett to write “Jamaica Mistaica,” a droll sendup of the affair.Mr. Buffett is survived by his wife, Jane (Slagsvol) Buffett; two daughters, Savanah Jane Buffett and Sarah Buffett; a son, Cameron; two grandsons; and two sisters, Lucy and Laurie Buffett.In a 1979 interview with Rolling Stone, Mr. Buffett was asked about a previous remark in which he somewhat incongruously cited the wholesome choral director Mitch Miller and the marauding Gulf Coast pirate Jean Lafitte as two of his greatest inspirations.“Mitch Miller, for sure,” Mr. Buffett said, doubtless in acknowledgment of the way his own fans sang along with him at concerts. “In the old days: “Sing Along with Mitch?” Who didn’t?”“But Jean Lafitte was my hero as a romantic character,” he continued. “I’m not sure he was a musical influence. His lifestyle influenced me, most definitely, ’cause I’m the very opposite of Mitch Miller.”Aaron Boxerman More

Alex Bechtel’s new musical, sort of “a pandemic parable,” gives voice to a mythical character in “The Odyssey.”The composer and lyricist Alex Bechtel didn’t go looking for Penelope, the mythical character in “The Odyssey” famed for her clever weaving and steadfast endurance of long abandonment.At a low moment in Bechtel’s romantic life, Penelope came to him, inspiring music that developed into a concept album. A breakup album, really, begun in 2020 during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Bechtel was at home in Philadelphia, far from his partner in Boston, as their relationship fell apart — and as he wondered, with the nation’s stages shuttered, whether he would ever be able to work in theater again.The music, then, was also fed by what he called his “terror and confusion and grief and longing for this thing that I have chosen to do with my life.”“I started writing songs from the point of view of Penelope,” he said. “I never sat down to say, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to do an adaptation of “The Odyssey” from her point of view?’ It’s just, I was going through this large experience, and that character was within arm’s reach.”For the next couple of weeks, on a sandy-floored stage in Garrison, N.Y., she will blossom into three dimensions. “Penelope,” the delicate, contemporary, unconventional musical that evolved from Bechtel’s aching album of the same name, has a preview on Saturday and opens Sunday at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. With five musicians — pianist, percussionist and strings — who function at times as a chorus in the ancient Greek sense, the show has a cast of one, Tatiana Wechsler, who plays Penelope.“It’s kind of like if she were putting on her own cabaret act,” Wechsler said, “but then she gets stuck in the imaginings.”Directed in its world premiere by Eva Steinmetz, “Penelope” has a size well suited to the American theater’s lately straitened economics.That’s coincidental, though. While Bechtel joked that it’s lucky he “didn’t come out of the pandemic with a 45-person musical,” a solo piece simply seemed right for expressing Penelope’s isolation and loneliness as she waits for her adventuring husband, Odysseus, to return.“It needed to just be her,” Bechtel said on a cool and rainy August afternoon, fresh from playing the keyboard at a rehearsal down the road from the festival’s tented stage.Wechsler and Bechtel at a rehearsal for the musical, which grew out of an album project that was released digitally on Bandcamp.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times‘Sort of dream time’When Bechtel and Steinmetz talk about the project’s origins, a slight but unmistakable haze of nostalgia sometimes softens their recollections.“He and I were having what we called weekly office hours,” Steinmetz said, “which was sitting on my porch drinking wine and eating pizza and talking about life and love and politics and art and grief. It was really sweet.”“Part of that for me,” he said, “processing this thing I was moving through, was asking her opinion on this music that I was trying to construct into an album that had a narrative and a shape and was theatrical in its sort of construct. A lot of the ways that that album moves are because of things she was whispering in my ear.”“As it grew,” she said, “and we realized that there really was a character here and this really was a story, then office hours became the sort of dream time when we imagined what it would be like to live in a world where we could do live theater again, and where we could turn it into a show, but kind of couldn’t imagine what that world would look like.”The phrase that Bechtel uses to describe music appearing unbidden in his mind is “showing up,” which is how the album project had begun. What surprised him, after he had sent the tracks into the world, releasing them digitally on Bandcamp, was that new “Penelope” music kept showing up.“Partly,” he said, “that was the cyclical, unpredicted and nonlinear nature of healing. Like, you can’t just decide you’re done healing from a heartbreak. That’s not how the heart works.”But hope was also in the mix. As the reopening of theaters started to seem possible, Bechtel had reason to keep writing. He and Steinmetz started shaping the songs into a musical.To workshop the show, they asked the actor and writer Grace McLean — of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” and more recently of “Bad Cinderella” — to play Penelope.McLean was already a fan of “The Appointment,” the critically embraced Off Broadway abortion musical that Steinmetz and Bechtel made with Alice Yorke and the company Lightning Rod Special. But that show, which juxtaposes the lurid absurdism of imaginary fetuses singing for their lives with the stark realism of pregnant women seeking abortions, would seem to have little overlap with “Penelope.”Yet Steinmetz sees a common thread in each musical’s effort to “take a wild and often monstrous myth and expose the everyday humanity at the center of it. In both stories, there’s a person on the periphery, enduring consequences of the myth.”With “Penelope,” running through Sept. 17 at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Bechtel said he wanted his character to say “the stuff that she didn’t get to say in that poem.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesPenelope’s voiceBechtel’s long-ago first exposure to “The Odyssey” was an episode of “Wishbone,” the 1990s PBS children’s series where, he explained helpfully, “a dog becomes the lead character of classic tales of literature.” Penelope, however, “was a human woman, as I recall.”An inauspicious introduction? Maybe. Now, though, he has a long list of volumes that he considers the “works consulted” in the making of “Penelope.” Emily Wilson’s translation of “The Odyssey” is on it, as well as Margaret Atwood’s “The Penelopiad,” Mary Oliver’s “Devotions: Collected Poems,” and Annie-B Parson’s “The Choreography of Everyday Life,” a pandemic meditation that considers “The Odyssey.”The book that spoke powerfully to McLean was Madeline Miller’s novel “Circe,” in which Penelope and her loom figure vividly. McLean borrowed Bechtel’s copy — “He tends to carry all of his little source material books around,” she said by phone — and in it she “saw the influence of this strong, witchy woman that they wanted to invoke in their Penelope.”If the character was Bechtel and Steinmetz’s when they brought her on, the three of them tailored it to fit McLean, who ultimately wrote the musical’s book with them. Through improvisation, they found what she called “the connective tissue” between the songs. Then professional and personal scheduling conflicts kept her from taking on the role at Hudson Valley Shakespeare.“But what I’m hearing from Alex and Eva,” McLean said, “is that it’s not necessarily just bespoke to Grace McLean — that it’s translating to Tatiana as well. That makes me feel like we hopefully tapped into something that sounds like Penelope’s voice, not just Grace’s or Alex’s or Eva’s.”The sound of Penelope’s voice, of course, is open to invention. “The Odyssey,” for one, isn’t much interested in her.Bechtel, though, was drawn to that empty space where her voice might have been: “The stuff that she didn’t get to say in that poem, and the stuff that she didn’t get to experience in that poem.”This “Penelope” is all her story — and what he calls “a pandemic parable,” too. She is a woman trapped at home, suffused with longing, and taking the same nature walk too many times a day.Remember that? More