Women Composers Featured in Brooklyn Opera Series 3/27

Two Brooklyn opera companies, AMERICAN OPERA PROJECTS (AOP) and OPERA ON TAP (OOT), will present Opera Grows in Brooklyn: Ladies' Night in honor of Women's History Month and as the latest installment of their Opera Grows in Brooklyn series. The evening will feature an interactive, dystopic murder-mystery in Kamala Sankaram's futuristic Miranda; scenes from Paula Kimper's pioneering love story Patience & Sarah; and Prairie Dogs, Rachel Peters' darkly humorous one-act about broken families, prairie dog infestations, and the girl who believes her fascination with taxidermy will solve both. The show will be held on Sunday, March 27th at 7 pm at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn's DUMBO neighborhood. Tickets are $15 in advance at www.galapagosartspace.com and $20 at the door.

Opera Grows in Brooklyn is an ongoing collaboration between American Opera Projects, "known for bringing cutting-edge vocal production to the masses," (New York), Opera on Tap, "...raucous and sublime...un-elitist, imperfect, and fun..." (NY Sun) and Galapagos Art Space, that presents 90 minutes of music from contemporary opera composers in a hip, cabaret-style atmosphere. Audiences have a chance to meet the artists after the performance.

American Opera Projects starts the evening off with scenes from Patience & Sarah, a powerful story of two young women who meet, fall in love, and resolve to devote their lives to one another. With music by Paula Kimper and text by Wende Persons, the opera is closely based on Isabel Miller's 1969 novel, which in turn was inspired by the true story of two 19th-century women, the painter Mary Ann Willson and her companion Miss Brundage. AOP presented the world premiere of this controversial opera at the 1998 Lincoln Center Festival. Starring soprano Adrienne Danrich, mezzo-soprano Rosalie Sullivan, and tenor Brandon Snook. Music direction by Kelly Horsted.

Opera on Tap will present the one-act opera Prairie Dogs, libretto by Royce Vavrek, music by Rachel Peters. Prairie Dogs is the second in a triptych of operas that constitute The Wild Beast of the Bungalow. Inspired by the Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington, Alberta, Prairie Dogs finds an eleven-year-old Girl in a town overrun by prairie dogs. Her father has been shooting the strays on the property and cheating on his wife. The Girl solves both problems simultaneously: she divorces her real parents, becomes obsessed with taxidermy, and creates her own prairie dog family, only to find that they are not the affectionate substitutes she'd hoped they would be.

Reality television and high art combine in Miranda, a multi-media singspiel by Kamala Sankaram where the audience becomes detective, judge, and jury for an unsolved crime. Set in the near future, this dystopic hybrid of a murder-mystery play and a CourtTV reality show asks audiences to decide which of three suspects is a killer. Through an innovative mix of Hindustani classical music, Baroque counterpoint, tango, and hip-hop, Miranda explores what the word "opera" means to the modern audience. Performed by Kamala Sankaram, Drew Fleming, Pat Muchmore, Hubert Chen, Ed Rosenberg, Jeff Hudgins, and Amanda Villalobos.

"You never really know if you'll be there for the premiere of the next great masterwork by the next great composer" the opera blog Parterrebox declared in 2010 about Opera Grows in Brooklyn. In 2011, audiences can look forward to evenings focusing on African-American composers (June 12), operas based on contemporary Brooklyn authors (Sep. 18), and Rock and Roll vs. Opera (Dec. 11). Each performance begins at 7pm on a Sunday at Galapagos Art Space in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Visit www.operaprojects.org/operagrowsinbrooklyn for more info on
this event's featured artists.