Glimmerglass set to return, will move festival outdoors
Opera and musical theater program tailored for season
The Glimmerglass Festival, Cooperstown’s annual summer opera and musical theater festival, has announced its return for this year after being canceled in 2020 due to the pandemic. This year however, the festival will be held outdoors on the lawns of the festival grounds. The festival will run from July 15 through Aug. 17.
While moving the festival has been done in order to follow pandemic safety protocols, the program has been specially tailored for the outdoors. The stage has been designed by Peter J. Davison, and was inspired by Cooperstown’s surroundings. It will be built on the south side of the festival’s campus, and the lawn will be divided into distanced "Festival Squares," which can be shared by a maximum of four from the same party.
The 2021 season will offer new productions of Mozart’s "The Magic Flute;" Verdi’s "Il Trovatore;"
Offenbach’s "Songbird (La Périchole);" Gods and Mortals, an event featuring works of Wagner; and "To the World," a concert of musical theater favorites. These performances will feature guest artists Raehann Bryce-davis, William Burden, Amanda Castro, Denyce Graves, Ian Koziara, Gregory Kunde, Isabel Leonard, Latonia Moore, Eric Owens, Michael Mayes and Alexandria Shiner.
The festival will also include world premiere of "The Passion of Mary
Cardwell Dawson," a new musical about the founder of the National Negro Opera Company, the longest-running all-black opera company in the United States.
This season is also the beginning of Common Ground, a three-year initiative that will unveil six new pieces that tell stories of life in America. It will begin this summer with On Trac|<, a dance piece composed by Nicolas Lell Benavides and choreographed and performed by Amanda Castro, that looks
at the intersection of human and machine in rural America.
This will also mark the start of creating a film version of "The Knock," a world-premiere one-act opera by Aleksandra Vrebalov and Deborah Brevoort which tells a story centered on a group of military wives awaiting news of their deployed husbands.
Tickets go on sale March 31.
For more information, visit www.glimmerglass.org.