Atlanta Opera goes outdoors

Productions will occur in a tent pitched on Oglethorpe’s baseball field.

Extreme times call for creative measures.

This fall, the Atlanta Opera is going alfresco.

Today, the opera company announced that instead of ”Madame Butterfly” and Festival Puccini, Atlanta Opera will perform a completely changed program of shorter operas, with casts of eight members or less and 10-person orchestras.

In an innovative experiment, these operas will be performed outdoors, under an open-sided circus tent.

In October and November, the opera will be performing “Pagliacci” and “The Kaiser of Atlantis.” Other productions will be announced at a later date.

”There is conflicting information” about the pandemic, said general and artistic director Tomer Zvulun, “but one thing that is consistently backed up by epidemiologists is that outdoors is safer than indoors.”

The tent, pitched on Oglethorpe

University’s baseball field in Brookhaven, will hold a maximum of 240 patrons, compared to the 2,750 seats available at the opera’s previous home, the Cobb Energy Center. The sides of the tent will remain open, allowing outside air to move continuously over the audience.

Numerous other precautions are planned to protect both the audience and the musicians.

Patrons will be seated in “pods” of up to four seats, each pod separated from its neighbors by a minimum of six feet. There will be staggered entry times and a touchless ticketing system.

The musicians will also be isolated from each other by plexiglass shields, and the chorus will be “Zoomed” into productions by way of video screens.

Zvulun said the opera company is being advised by a health and safety task force of epidemiolo

COURTESY ATLANTA OPERA Talise Trevigne, soprano, will sing the role of Nedda in the Atlanta Opera production of “Pagliacci,” which will be presented in October and November in an outdoor performance under an open-sided circus tent.