Tag Archives: Opera

This Opera About Chelsea Manning Will Give You Chills

Whether you’re an Opera aficionado who’s been following the Chelsea Manning case from the beginning, or a musical newbie who’s never heard of Wikileaks, The Source will make you laugh, cry and doubt your government.

This unconventional opera tells the story of how Private Chelsea Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of classified government documents. It also touches on her struggles, as a transgender woman, to be housed in a women’s prison following her arrest.

When you think of opera, you probably imagine a string of high-pitched notes in foreign languages, a fat lady singing, an aria from Carmen, and those tiny glasses rich people wear when they sit in the balcony.

The Source isn’t like that.

First, the music may make composer Georges Bizet roll over in his grave, because instead of symphonic ballads you’ll find electronica, autotounes, jazz and pop. And the libretto isn’t drawn from some European classic. No, the opera’s script comes from the classified military documents that Manning leaked. This opera manages to paint a picture of Manning’s identity while engaging with events such as the 2007 bombing of American journalists who were believed – mistakenly – to be Iraqi insurgents.

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The show touches on identity and the “tyranny of binaries” – gender binaries, musical binaries, political binaries and moral binaries. The world is more grey than black and white.

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The New York Times called the show “ambitious” and “stealthily shattering,” with an “enigmatic libretto” and a “chilling production.” The Los Angeles Times gave it similarly rave reviews.

The Source stars Mellissa Hughes, Samia Mounts, Isaiah Robinson and Jonathan Woody. It was written by Mark Doten, composed by Ted Hearne and directed by Daniel Fish.

Catch The Source in Los Angeles and San Francisco this fall. If you can’t make it to a live performance, stream the CD.

Grab your front row tickets.

 

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Opera Opens to Rave Reviews

Twenty-Seven, the highly anticipated opera about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, opened in the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. The audiences have been big and the reviews very positive.

Twenty-Seven focuses on Stein and Toklas’s Paris Salon which was visited by a who’s who of twentieth century greats: Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso and Rene Matisse to name but a few.

Stephanie Blythe plays Stein and Elizabeth Futral portrays Toklas. James Robinson, the artistic director of the Opera Theatre, said, ‘It’s fantastic that right here in the middle of the country we’re doing these things and people are just fine with it.’

Sarah Bryan Miller of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch gave the production her thumbs up:

“Blythe is a force of nature whose large frame supports a stupendous voice of great range. She made an utterly believable Stein, secure in her absolute rightness, hilarious and sometimes cruel in her epigrams. (‘I’ve met many geniuses in my time,’ she tells Man Ray. ‘You, my dear, are a photographer.’) She surrenders in a belated trial of conscience, over the way in which she and Alice survived the horrors of World War II as American Jews in Vichy France.

“Singers love Gordon’s music because he knows what works vocally and what doesn’t, and because he cares about getting it right. He has said that he hopes to see the day when opera and musical theater meet, and 27 helps to bring it closer. There are hummable tunes and recurring themes, drama and sweetness, in a well-wrought score. Vavrek is Steinian without stealing Stein and keeps the story moving, for a clever, witty libretto.”