Music-Theatre Group News

This September, Opera Philadelphia launches O17, the inaugural edition of its game-changing new annual season-opening festival. A twelve-day immersion that promises to "blanket the city with opera" (Washington Post), the festival kicks off new partnerships with two key local cultural institutions. Each will host one of the festival's seven operatic happenings, both of them new operas developed - like 2016's award-winning sensation Breaking the Waves - under the auspices of the company's celebrated Composer in Residence program. 

Hang the koi-nobori (carp streamers) and don your kabuto (samurai helmets): Japan's Children's Day is on its way!

Boston Lyric Opera's Stanford Calderwood General & Artistic Director Esther Nelson announced today an eclectic 2017/18 Season designed to please die-hard opera fans as well as newcomers to the art form.  Each of the Company's productions will be presented on a different area stage, starting October 13-22, 2017 with a new production of Giacomo Puccini's Tosca featuring the American debut of award-winning rising global star Elena Stikhina in the title role. The World Premiere of The Nefarious, Immoral but Highly Profitable Enterprise of Mr. Burke & Mr. Hare (a.k.a. Burke & Hare) by composer Julian Grant and librettist Mark Campbell follows November 8-12, 2017.  From March 16-25, 2018, BLO presents Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's pivotal early-20th century work The Threepenny Opera.  BLO closes its Season in May with Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti, paired with his Arias and Barcarolles, to mark the Lawrence, Mass.-born composer's centennial.

LCT's production of How to Transcend a Happy Marriage begins performances on February 23rd at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater (150 West 65th Street). At a dinner party in the wilds of New Jersey, two married couples discuss a younger acquaintance - a polyamorous woman who also hunts her own meat. Fascinated, they invite this mysterious woman and her two live-in boyfriends to a New Year's Eve party, which alters the course of their lives. How to Transcend a Happy Marriage asks: how much love can a twosome contain? What are the limits of friendship, and what happens when parents who have forgotten their own wildness have a wild rumpus all their own?

Lincoln Center Theater Platform Series, a forum for public discussion between Lincoln Center Theater artists and theatergoers, continues today, March 8, with HOW TO TRANSCEND A HAPPY MARRIAGE author Sarah Ruhl and director Rebecca Taichman.

American Composers Orchestra (ACO), under the leadership of Artistic Director Derek Bermel and Music Director George Manahan, continues its 40th Anniversary Season on Friday, March 24, 2017 at 7:30pm with Orchestra Underground: Past Forward at Carnegie Hall's subterranean Zankel Hall.

Lincoln Center Theater Platform Series, a forum for public discussion between Lincoln Center Theater artists and theatergoers, continues on Wednesday, March 8, with HOW TO TRANSCEND A HAPPY MARRIAGE author Sarah Ruhl and director Rebecca Taichman.

American Composers Orchestra (ACO), under the leadership of Artistic Director Derek Bermel and Music Director George Manahan, continues its 40th Anniversary Season on Friday, March 24, 2017 at 7:30pm with Orchestra Underground: Past Forward at Carnegie Hall's subterranean Zankel Hall. Now in its 13th year, Orchestra Underground continues as ACO's subversive and entrepreneurial redefinition of the orchestra as an elastic ensemble. Led by Manahan, Past Forward illustrates the role the past plays in the present, from composers' own personal explorations of their roots, to broader investigations of the universal role of memory and recollection.

Check please! Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati opens the second half of the season with the hilarious and sassy musical First Date, by Austin Winsberg, with music and lyrics by Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner.

What's new in opera? Everything you can imagine--and much that you couldn't conceive of--all in the space of a few days in New York.

Check please! Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati opens the second half of the season with the hilarious and sassy musical First Date, by Austin Winsberg, with music and lyrics by Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner.

OPERA America, the national service organization for opera and the nation's leading champion for American opera, announces the details for the New Opera Showcase, taking place today, January 13 at 8:00 p.m. at historic Town Hall in the heart of New York City's Times Square.

 Lincoln Center Theater (under the direction of Andre Bishop) has announced that Lena Hall, Brian Hutchison, David McElwee, Naian Gonzalez Norvind, Omar Metwally, Austin Smith, Marisa Tomei, and Robin Weigert will be featured in the cast of its upcoming production of HOW TO TRANSCEND A HAPPY MARRIAGE, a new play by Sarah Ruhl.  The production, which will be directed by Rebecca Taichman, begins previews Thursday, February 23 and opens on Monday, March 20 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater (150 West 65 Street). 

Check please! Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati opens the second half of the season with the hilarious and sassy musical First Date, by Austin Winsberg, with music and lyrics by Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner.

OPERA America, the national service organization for opera and the nation's leading champion for American opera, announces the details for the New Opera Showcase, taking place on Friday, January 13 at 8:00 p.m. at historic Town Hall in the heart of New York City's Times Square.

BroadwayWorld continues our exclusive content series, in collaboration with The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, which delves into the library's unparalleled archives, and resources. Below, check out a piece by Doug Reside, Lewis and Dorothy Cullman Curator for the Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts on: Political Satires in The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts' Theatre on highlights from 2016.

Tickets are now on sale for American Composers Orchestra's (ACO) 40th Anniversary Season, under the leadership of Artistic Director Derek Bermel and Music Director George Manahan. This season includes eight world premieres by a diverse set of composers performed by ACO at Carnegie Hall and Symphony Space, and continues the orchestra's commitment to serve as a catalyst for the creation of new orchestral music, providing unprecedented opportunities for American composers to create new work and for audiences to discover it. Founded in 1977, ACO remains the only orchestra in the world dedicated exclusively to the creation, performance, preservation, and promulgation of music by American composers. To date, ACO has performed music by 800 American composers, including 350 world premieres and newly commissioned works. ACO takes its commitment to fostering new work beyond the stage in its annual Underwood New Music Readings for emerging composers, now in its 26th year in New York, and through its program EarShot, the National Orchestra Composition Discovery Network, which brings the Readings experience to orchestras across the country in partnership with American Composers Forum, the League of American Orchestras, and New Music USA.

On Monday, September 12, 2016, Works & Process at the Guggenheim presents discussion with the creators and excerpts of Opera Philadelphia's upcoming world premiere of Breaking the Waves by composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek.

In collaboration with New York's Music-Theatre Group, Opera Philadelphia is proud to announce that Rene Orth has been selected as its sixth Composer-in-Residence. Orth, whose music is 'whimsical, spiky, sometimes show-bizy, always dramatic, reflective, rarely predictable, and often electronic' (Musical America), was chosen for the three-season position from a national field of applicants, and now has the opportunity to follow a personalized development track focused on the advancement of her skills as an operatic composer.

Opera Philadelphia, in collaboration with Music-Theatre Group in New York, is proud to announce that composer Rene Orth, whose music “is whimsical, spikey, sometimes show-bizy, always dramatic, reflective, rarely predictable, and often electronic” (Musical America), has been selected as its sixth Composer in Residence (CIR). Orth was chosen from a national field of applicants for the position and now has the opportunity to follow a personalized development track focused on the advancement of her skills as an operatic composer.