Angels in America Opera Premieres in Boston, June 16-24

According to Variety, an opera adaptation of Tony Kushner's Tony-winning two-part play Angels in America, is set to have its American premiere at the Boston Center for the Arts' Stanford Calderwood Pavilion on June 16th, 17th, 20th and 24th.

The piece will be a compressed chamber opera version of Millenium Approaches and Perestroika, composed by Transylvanian-born Peter Eotvos and with a libretto (in English) by Mari Mezei. "At two hours and 25 minutes, the opera runs a little more than a third of the total running time of Kushner's twin plays," states the article.

Steven Maler, who is VP for programming at the Wang Center for the Performing Arts, will helm the opera. Angels in America will feature baritone Drew Poling as Roy Cohn, tenor Matthew DiBattista as Louis, baritone Nikolas Sean-Paul Nackley as Joe, soprano Amanda Forsythe as the Angel, Ja-Nae Duanbe as Hannah, countertenor Matthew Truss as Belize, baritone Thomas Meglioranza as Prior and Anne Harley as Harper. Gil Rose will conduct.

Billed as "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," the Angels in America plays are Kushner's mosaic of life at the dusk of the twentieth century (specifically the mid-eighties), featuring an interconnected array of characters such as a once-closeted Mormom and his wife, a homosexual man dying of AIDS and his confused lover, a sexy, sage drag queen, and a mysterious angel who offers both annoyance and comfort. The plays--which both opened on Broadway in 1993 both won Tony Awards for Best Play, while Millenium Approaches won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Both plays were later into an Emmy Award-winning two-part movie for HBO, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Emma Thompson, Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and others.

The Angels in America opera was first commissioned by Theatre du Chatelet in Paris in 2004 in a production starring Julia Migenes (it was later filmed for PBS' 'Great Performances' and also produced in Hamburg, Germany). The current production will be presented by Opera Unlimited, which is a collaboration between Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Opera Boston.

Visit www.bcaonline.org for more information and tickets.