Philly offers 12-day explosion of operas
‘Comet’ says goodbye
PHILADELPHIA, Sept 6, (Agencies): In a downtown theater, five teenagers take refuge at a site once occupied by members of the radical group MOVE. Across the street, a serial killer terrorizes Victorian London. Up the block, the bird-catcher Papageno longs for true love. A bit further afield, spectators at two museums watch opera amid the art.
Welcome to O17, as Opera Philadelphia is calling its festival season, a 12-day explosion of works new and old performed more or less simultaneously at diverse venues in the heart of the nation’s fifth-largest city.
“The idea is to kind of Netflix the opera experience, to package a binge-watching opportunity,” said David Devan, the company’s general director. “Everything you’re going to see is like with your remote control going to a completely different channel.”
So from Sept 14 through the 25th, customers can choose from among five full-scale productions. Three are world premieres: “We Shall Not Be Moved,” with music by Daniel Bernard Roumain, libretto by Marc Bamuthi Joseph and directed by choreographer Bill T. Jones; “Elizabeth Cree,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell, adapted from a thriller by Peter Ackroyd; and “The Wake World,” an adaptation of a mystical fairy tale by the English occultist Aleister Crowley with music by David Hertzberg that will be performed alongside the Impressionist treasures of The Barnes Foundation.
There’s also Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” in a version by Australian director Barrie Kosky that sets the characters against an animated backdrop and replaces dialogue with silent-movie titles, and a double bill called “War Stories” pairing Monteverdi’s “Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda” with a modern work, “I Have No Stories to Tell You,” music by Lembit Beecher and libretto by Hannah Moscovitch.
As if that’s not enough, the festival offers soprano Sondra Radvanovsky — a week before she opens the Metropolitan Opera season in Bellini’s “Norma” — singing a recital and leading a master class, plus a free broadcast in Independence National Historical Park of last season’s production of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.”
Burst
Why this burst of events packed closely together, instead of the previous format which spaced four productions over the course of an entire season?
The hope is that the barrage of new and offbeat offerings will attract local ticket buyers tempted by the unusual repertory and also that out-of-town visitors may come and stay for several events.
For Devan, it’s a simple matter of survival. The old model of asking customers to buy subscription packages that committed them months ahead has long been failing — an experience shared by most US opera companies.
“By everyone’s agreement we were getting better, but we weren’t seeing the results at the box office,” he said. Had the company not made this drastic change, “We calculated that we would be unsustainable within a 10-year period. Costs go up. We weren’t attracting enough new customers.”
But Devan has not abandoned the core of loyal fans who still prefer the subscription model. The company will stage two productions later in the season — George Benjamin’s modern masterpiece “Written on Skin” in February and Bizet’s ever-popular “Carmen” in April and May.
That hybrid approach may become the model for other mid-size and smaller companies. Both Fort Worth Opera, which switched to festival-only in 2007, and Vancouver Opera, which did so last season, say they plan to add back one or two fall or winter productions to please local fans.
Bernadette Peters is Broadway’s new Dolly, with the theater-world fan favorite now confirmed to lead the cast of the mega-selling, Tony-winning revival of “Hello, Dolly!” in January.
The casting, which had been the subject of persistent rumors in the theater industry, was seemingly confirmed Tuesday morning in a social media post, now removed, that said that Peters and Victor Garber would join the cast early next year. By Tuesday evening, the producers of “Hello, Dolly!,” led by Scott Rudin, had confirmed that Peters would step into the role. Garber, who would replace Midler’s co-star David Hyde Pierce, was not mentioned in the confirmation.
The question of who would replace Bette Midler in “Dolly!,” one of the top-selling shows on Broadway, has been a hot topic of speculation this summer. In the theater-industry rumor mill, a slew of names made the rounds — including Dolly Parton and Sutton Foster — but by August, Peters, last on Broadway in the 2011 production of “Follies,” began to look like the frontrunner. At the time, the comment from Scott Rudin, the show’s lead producer, was the coy, “There’s no replacement for Bette.”
But earlier on Tuesday, Garber’s husband, Rainer Andreesen, mentioned the “Dolly” casting in a comment on an Instagram post. That post has since been removed, but a screenshot remains.
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A rainy Labor Day weekend brought a minor rise to the Broadway box office, with most individual shows upticking and “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” going dark after a highgrossing but ultimately unprofitable run.
“Great Comet” ($1,183,228) climbed more than 20% (about $200,000) thanks to last-minute business, hurrying in to see the show before the closing that was announced soon after a casting controversy involving the actors who would replace Josh Groban, the topliner who kept the production’s weekly box office high for all of last season.
The week-to-week jump at “Comet” was easily the biggest on the chart last week, although “Groundhog Day” ($770,590) jumped about 18% in advance of its Sept 17 closing.
With the summer wrapping up, it’s been pretty clear for a while what the successes of the season have been. There was Tony champ “Dear Evan Hansen” ($1,683,308), of course, which over the course of the summer upshifted from its already robust sales. Another Tony contender, “Come From Away” ($1,309,259), held high and strong all summer, and of course “Hello, Dolly!” ($2,273,240) spent most of the season in the stratosphere (except for the weeks when star Bette Midler was on a vacation).