Opera festival back, but where?
Tickets went on sale June 1 for the West Edge Festival 2017, with the big surprise being the venue. It does not quite have one.
West Edge Opera, the sponsoring entity, lost its use of the historic 16th Street Station in West Oakland and has not finalized a replacement space yet. So buyers of tickets will be informed by email at a later date where to go on the night of the performance.
The location, an industrial space, will be announced at www.west edgeopera.org in the forthcoming weeks. The festival opens Aug. 2, and free shuttles to the as-yet unknown location will be offered from the West Oakland BART Station.
“I wish we could tell people exactly where we are going,” said Mark Streshinsky, general director of the company. “I can say the new space is in a historic warehouse that was built for the fabrication of the original Bay Bridge.”
Founded as Berkeley Opera in 1979, and renamed West Edge in 2012, the Berkeley company presents a summer festival of three complete, fully staged operas in a space that was not built for fully staged operas.
For the past two seasons it has used the 16th Street Station, a Beaux Arts landmark that was built in 1912 as the terminus for transcontinental passenger train travel. It is now owned by Bridge Housing, a nonprofit builder of affordable housing based in San Francisco.
To stage an opera in the Main Hall, everything was brought in by West Edge, including electricity, a platform stage and seating for 500. Last year, nine performances were either sellouts or near sell-outs, and a 10th was added.
In March, West Edge was informed by Bridge Housing that Oakland would no longer grant special permits for public events inside the station, and the scramble began.
Wherever it lands, West Edge will again stage nine performances in repertory. The operas are “Hamlet,” by Ambroise Thomas, from 1868; “The Chastity Tree,” by Vicente Martin y Soler, 1775; and “Frankenstein,” by Libby Larsen, from 1990.
“We don’t program top-10 opera,” said Streshinsky. “We do opera that is wild and different and works well in a space that is not a traditional theater.”