Charlottesville Opera To Present Rebecca Head Free Lecture, 3/24

Rebecca Mead, staff writer at the New Yorker and author of My Life in Middlemarch, will give a free lecture to ticketholders and Virginia Festival of the Book participants before Charlottesville Opera's March 24 matinee performance of Middlemarch in Spring. Mead will speak about George Eliot's seminal work Middlemarch, which composer Allen Shearer and librettist Claudia Stevens adapted for the operatic stage.

Middlemarch in Spring, which had its world premiere in San Francisco in 2015, received rave reviews from the Encyclopedia Britannica and San Francisco Chronicle, both of which recognized it as a noteworthy new work. Charlottesville Opera will bring this new work to the East Coast for the first time on March 23 and 24 at The Paramount Theater in downtown Charlottesville, featuring a number of artists from the original cast, including renowned bass-baritone Philip Skinner.

In the New York Times bestseller My Life in Middlemarch (Crown, 2014), Rebecca Mead explores the deep connection she has had with Eliot's masterpiece throughout her adult life. Part biography, part literary exploration, part memoir, Mead reveals the connections between her life and the themes of Eliot's masterpiece. Author Joyce Carol Oates called the book "a poignant testimony to the abiding power of fiction" in the New York Times Book Review, and it was recognized by the San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, Guardian (UK), and several other publications as one of the best books of 2014.

Rebecca Mead joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1997, for which she has profiled Lena Dunham, Shaquille O'Neal, and composer Nico Muhly. She is also a regular contributor for its Talk of the Town series. In addition to My Life in Middlemarch, she is also the author of One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding (Penguin Press, 2007).

Middlemarch in Spring marks Charlottesville Opera's first-ever collaboration with the Virginia Festival of the Book, which will be held from March 22-26, 2017. The festival is an annual celebration of books, reading, literacy, and literary culture that attracts more than 20,000 participants each year. Jane Kulow, Director of the Festival of the Book, echoes the company's enthusiasm for this piece: "We love seeing books brought to life in new ways, and we're delighted to collaborate with Charlottesville Opera to present Middlemarch in Spring during the 2017 Virginia Festival of the Book!"

For 40 years, Charlottesville Opera, the recently renamed Ash Lawn Opera, has produced high-quality opera and musical theater at affordable prices in Central Virginia. Their fortieth anniversary season marks its most ambitious yet, with performances of Middlemarch in Spring in March followed by Verdi's Rigoletto in July and Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! in July and August. Charlottesville Opera also continues its longtime commitment to providing free educational programs to community members of all ages, including its upcoming Artist-in-Residence series, held in April. These programs reach over 1,500 participants annually.