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IN Series presents
World Premiere by Composer Damien Geter and Librettist Jarrod Lee

The Delta King’s Blues

Commissioned by IN Series

December 6-21, 2025 | Washington, DC & Baltimore

An immersive operatic experience, Inspired by the legendary tale of blues icon Robert Johnson and his fabled “deal with the devil.”

(Washington, D.C.) October 27, 2025 — IN Series, the Washington, D.C.-based company, proudly announces the world premiere of The Delta King’s Blues, a newly commissioned blues opera composed by Damien Geter with a libretto by D.C.-based Jarrod Lee. In this immersive juke-joint experience, the theater will be transformed into an intimate blues club where select audiences will be seated at cabaret-style tables and served food and drinks as the story unfolds around them, creating a multisensory night of music. Performances will take place in Washington, D.C. on December 6–7 & 12–14 (340 Maple Drive SW), and in Baltimore, Maryland on December 19–21 (2640 Space). Ticket and information now available at www.inseries.org

“My inspiration for The Delta King's Blues came after I watched the Netflix documentary entitled Devil at the Crossroads about Robert Johnson,” said composer Damien Geter. “I vaguely knew of Johnson, but after digging a little more about his story, I quickly learned that he is arguably the most important American musician whose influence is still heard today. After sitting on this story for some time, in 2019 while discussing potential stories for the stage, I told my collaborator Jarrod Lee about the idea of creating an operatic adaptation of Johnson's transaction with the Devil—and the rest is history, as they say.”

"As part of the Cardwell Dawson Fellowship with IN Series, I had regular check-ins with Artistic Director Timothy Nelson to discuss the prospects of what would be my big story as a librettist," said librettist Jarrod Lee. "While speaking, I gladly shared the subject matter of Robert Johnson and the vision Damien Geter and I had for turning this into an opera. During the pandemic shutdown, I was privileged to have the safety of sitting at my mother’s dining room table for roughly five months, researching and writing text for what eventually became a grand opera but with revisions, and has since become a one act opera called The Delta King's Blues. The check-in with Timothy seemed like destiny because, when I shared the desire to lean into the myth of this Blues King, he politely showed a screen with Robert Johnson which was on his playlist prior to our meeting. It just had to be."

Under the stage direction of Alicia Washington and music direction of Matthew Lynch (US conducting debut), the production will feature a stunning cast of talent including cross-genre soprano Melissa Wimbish, IN Series returning tenor Albert Lee, Washington D.C. native and Metropolitan Opera Laffont competition winner Christian Simmons, celebrated Baritone Marvin Wayne Allen III, and former Cafritz Young Artist and tenor Jonathan Pierce Rhodes. Blending theater and opera with the blues, the production will include instrumentation drawn from a traditional blues quartet and classical string quartet.

"The Delta King's Blues represents in one visionary project, all the artistic and social threads of IN Series as a company,” said IN Series Artistic Director Timothy Nelson. “Firstly, it lifts up a wholly and truly American story, and tells with mystery and joy of the advent of the original fundamentally American musical language—the blues—setting it proudly and audaciously beside the Western classical canon to both spar and dance. Furthermore, The Delta King's Blues spotlights the remarkable gifts of two emerging giants of classical music-theater storytelling today, Damien Geter, and with a longtime collaborator of our company Jarrod Lee. This production centers an untold story with roots outside historical power structures, and it heals opera's damaged canon in a generative way, by expanding and making it more whole.”

Robert Johnson the legendary musician and his “deal with the devil”!

Robert Johnson, born in 1911 in the Mississippi Delta, lived a brief but seismic life that helped shape the future of American music. Raised amid the poverty and racial violence of the Jim Crow South, he turned to music as a form of expression and survival, eventually mastering the guitar in a way that astonished his peers. His sudden artistic leap inspired the enduring legend that he sold his soul to the devil at a midnight crossroads, a myth that speaks to the almost supernatural power of his transformation and the eerie qualities of his sound.

Between 1936 and 1937, Johnson recorded only 29 songs, yet those haunting tracks (including “Cross Road Blues,” “Hellhound on My Trail,” and “Sweet Home Chicago”) became the foundation of Delta blues and a direct ancestor of rock and roll. His playing blended rhythm, bass, and melody so seamlessly that listeners swore they were hearing more than one musician. Beyond music, his life story has permeated film and pop culture for decades, appearing in award-winning films like O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Sinners.

Johnson’s life ended in mystery in 1938 at the age of 27, reportedly after being poisoned by a jealous husband. Nearly forgotten in his lifetime, his posthumous rise began in the 1960s, when his recordings were rediscovered and embraced as sacred texts by a new wave of blues and rock artists. Today, Robert Johnson stands not just as a musician, but as an icon of American folklore, a man whose voice still continues to inspire.

PRODUCTION INFORMATION

The Delta King’s Blues
Commissioned by IN Series

Music by Damien Geter
Libretto by Jarrod Lee
Directed by Alicia Washington
Music Direction by Matthew Lynch

FEATURING:              
Albert R. Lee - Robert Johnson
Christian Simmons - The Devil
Melissa Wimbish - Virginia
Marvin Wayne - Willy
Anthony Ballard - Son

PERFORMANCE DATES
340 Maple Drive SW (Pop-Up Theater), Washington, DC

Saturday, December 6 at 7:30 pm
Sunday, December 7 at 2:30 pm
Friday, December 12 at 7:30 pm
Saturday, December 13 at 7:30 pm
Sunday, December 14 at 2:30 pm

Ticket prices:
Reserved Seating: $72
General-Rear: $52
Student: $35

2640 Space
2640 St Paul St, Baltimore MD

Friday, December 19 at 7:30 pm
Saturday, December 20 at 7:30 pm
Sunday, December 21, at 2:30 pm

Ticket prices:
General Admission: $35
Student: $25

ABOUT DAMIEN GETER

Damien Geter is an acclaimed American composer whose rapidly growing body of work includes chamber, vocal, orchestral, and full operatic works. Praised by The New Yorker for writing “beautifully for voices and elegantly for orchestra,” his “emotionally driven” (Opera) compositions are widely hailed for their “skillful vocal writing” (Wall Street Journal). Geter is Richmond Symphony’s Composer-in-Residence through 2026, and Composer-in-Residence for Fall 2025 at both Indiana State University’s Contemporary Music Festival and Ear Taxi Festival. He serves as Music Director for Portland Opera.

This season, his song Amanirenas, commissioned by soprano Karen Slack for her African Queens art song program, continues to tour nationally at the Portland and Piedmont Operas, as well as the Naples Philharmonic in its orchestral premiere. His song cycle COTTON will be performed at La Jolla Music Society. Additionally, Richmond Symphony premieres his Loving v. Virginia Suite, the Chicago Philharmonic and Richmond Symphony present An African American Requiem, Ear Taxi Festival presents I Said What I Said, VocalEssence presents The Justice Symphony, Fresno Philharmonic performs Sinfonia Americana, and Resonance Works presents Weave In My Hardy Life.

As a conductor, Geter leads Portland Opera in Verdi’s Requiem, Symphony New Hampshire for their Holiday Pops concert, and Redlands Symphony in works by Britten, Copeland, and Teresa Carreño.

Geter has been recognized by the Library of Virginia with its honorary Patron of Letters degree, was honored at the 2025 Strong Men & Women in Virginia History awards presented by Dominion Energy and the Library of Virginia, and was selected as a 2025 BRAVO! honoree by the Chesterfield Education Foundation.

He is an alumnus of the Austrian American Mozart Festival and Aspen Opera Center, hosts the podcast ARTillery, and owns DG Music, Sans Fear Publishing. www.damiengetermusic.com.

ABOUT JARROD LEE

Librettist Jarrod Lee hails from Alabama and presently resides in Maryland. Lee’s collaborations include: Hello, Star with composer Carla Lucero, What is Love? An AI Story, Kandake, Spirit Moves and a song cycle called Journey to You with composer Timothy Amukele, Oshun, Two Corners, and a choral song Beyond What I See with composer B.E. Boykin, Voices of Zion, and an art song See your Equal with composer Ronald Walton. Developing operas include: Promised Land with composer Glenn McClure and Split-Second/LIFE with composer Jasmine Barnes. Lee has received commissions from the

Alliance for New Music Theater, the Atlanta Opera, IN Series, Finger Lakes Opera, Opera

Parallèle, Peabody Institute, Opera Theatre of St. Louis and the Washington National Opera. When creating stories, Jarrod draws from his experience as an opera singer, being Black, Gay, and American; adding to stories for opera by Black Writers. www.jarrodlee.com

ABOUT IN SERIES
IN Series is the standard-bearer for innovative opera theater in Washington DC. We make theater from music: transforming artists, audiences, and community by disrupting expectations, nourishing empathy, stimulating insight, and deepening the conversation. IN Series envisions a thriving global community in which opera is a fully integrated and essential part of collective conversation. In picturing the journey to this end, IN Series is a change-maker – a force that, with each groundbreaking production and outreach event, radically transforms perceptions of the “who”, “what”, “where”, and “why” of opera: who gets to make opera and for whom is it made; what is defined as an operatic experience; where operas take place; why we make opera; and why opera matters.

Founded by Carla Hübner in 1982 as a concert series of the former Mount Vernon College, “The In Series” became an independent non-profit arts organization in 2000 and has been a resident company at Source Theater since 2008. Timothy Nelson assumed the artistic directorship in 2018, quickly establishing the newly rebranded “IN Series” as DC’s home for “Thought, debate, history, and innovation” (DC Metro Theatre Arts) in opera.

IN Series is supported in part by major funding from Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz, Dallas Morse Coors; Billy Rose, and Paul M. Angell Family Foundations; the Robert Deutsch Foundation; the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities; the Maryland State Arts Council (msac.org); HumanitiesDC; Opera America; the Revada Foundation of the Logan Family; Dimick Foundation; Eugene M. Lang Foundation; Share Fund; Theodore H. Barth Foundation; William G. Baker Jr Memorial Fund of the Baltimore Community Foundation; the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation; Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation; and Wilhelm Family Foundation. We gratefully recognize the generous support of the Sami & Annie Totah Family Foundation; Robert N. Alfandre Foundation; John J. Leidy Foundation; the David Kalman Chaim Fund of the Baltimore Community Foundation.