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Press Releases
March 26: Pacific Opera Project Presents COVID fan tutte, Set on a So-Cal Golf Resort, Streamed Free Online
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Katy Salomon | Morahan Arts & Media
katy@morahanartsandmedia.com | 863.660.2214
Pacific Opera Project Presents COVID fan tutte
Streamed Online – Friday, March 26 at 5:30pm PT
Live, Drive-In Production, Performed in November 2020, Featured a New English Libretto Set
at a SoCal Golf Resort and Three Real-Life Opera Singer Couples Who Quarantined Together
“Despite this plague year of postponements, POP has refused to bow to the pandemic or its restrictions…
There is surely no opera company in this Covid-ravaged country with a better average for 2020.” – Opera Magazine
Los Angeles, CA (March 22, 2021) — On Friday, March 26, 2021 at 5:30pm PT, Pacific Opera Project (POP) presents a livestream of their critically acclaimed COVID fan tutte, a revolutionary production of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte that premiered in a live, drive-in format in Camarillo, California in November 2020.
COVID fan tutte featured a new English libretto by Artistic Director Josh Shaw and is set in 2020 at a SoCal golf resort. The updated plot follows two girls who are spending their quarantine at a SoCal golf resort and the local caddies have won their hearts. Don Alfonso, a rich, meddling member of the resort, is looking for some fun and instigates a bet with the boys to see if their girls are truly faithful. Despina, a waitress from the clubhouse is there to assist Don Alfonso in the charade. The boys are furloughed rather than sent off to war and return in disguise to tempt their girlfriends. Personal protective equipment, facemasks, and social distancing played a large part in the update, finally making the disguises and plot of Cosi fan tutte (almost) believable.
To ensure maximum safety and compliance, the cast featured three outstanding real-life couples – Jamie Chamberlin and Nathan Granner (Fiordiligi/Ferrando), Christina Pezzarossi and Colin Ramsey (Dorabella/Guglielmo), and Ariel Pisturino and E. Scott Levin (Despina and Don Alfonso) – who quarantined together before the performances. Kyle Naig conducted a socially distant orchestra from the harpsichord.
The drive-in format allowed 90 vehicles per performance, with the number of people in each car limited only to the number of seat belts. The show was presented within COVID guidelines with live video projected above the stage with supertitles and sound broadcast into the cars via FM radio.
Performance Information
COVID fan tutte
Streaming on YouTube and Facebook
Tickets: Free
More Information: www.pacificoperaproject.com/
Music by W. A. Mozart
Original libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte
English adaptation by Josh Shaw?
Runtime: 2 hours and 10 minutes
Presented with orchestra, in English, with projected supertitles?
Director/Designer: Josh Shaw
Conductor/Arranger: Kyle Naig
Costumer: Maggie Green
Assistant Director: Carson Gilmore
Stage Manager: Kourtni Dale-Noll Miitchner
About Pacific Opera Project
Founded in 2011 by Artistic Director Josh Shaw and Music Director Stephen Karr, Los Angeles’s Pacific Opera Project (POP) is dedicated to providing quality opera that is innovative, affordable, and entertaining in order to build a broader audience for the art form. LA Magazine writes “If you think you hate opera, you’ve probably never seen a Pacific Opera Project show.” POP’s regularly sold out performances take place in a wide variety of venues, from outdoors, to small clubs, big amphitheatres, and warehouses. LA Weekly named POP the “Best Opera Company in Los Angeles” in 2018, writing “making opera cool, affordable, accessible and enticing to young audiences is easier said than done. It’s also something every opera company in the country is trying desperately to do… [Pacific Opera Project] is not trying desperately to be hip. It just is.” In 2020, POP was awarded The American Prize in Opera Performance.
POP has presented more than 30 innovative new productions to date, including revolutionary drive-in productions of COVID fan tutte and the US staged premieres of two Gluck operas in November 2020; its critically acclaimed version of Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio set as an episode of Star Trek; a “fan-tastic” (LA Daily News) Harajuku-themed Mikado; a Dick Tracy Don Giovanni; a Magic Flute inspired by 1990s video games, called “one of the freshest takes on Mozart’s 1791 classic I have come across” (Operawire); and many more. POP’s signature take on Puccini’s La bohème, “AKA The Hipsters,” set in modern day Los Angeles, has become a holiday tradition, returning year after year to sold-out audiences and called “riotous” (LA Weekly) and “an undeniably fun night at the theater that should not be missed” (Stage Raw). POP gave the world premiere of Brooke deRosa’s The Monkey's Paw in 2017 and plans to perform the United States premiere of Vivaldi's Ercole su'l Termodonte in winter 2020.
In 2019, POP presented its most ambitious project to date: the first ever true-to-story bilingual Madama Butterfly performed in LA’s Little Tokyo. A co-production with Houston’s Opera in the Heights, the production featured a new libretto written by POP Artistic Director Josh Shaw and Opera in the Heights Artistic Director Eiki Isomura, presenting Puccini’s story as if it actually happened and attempting to answer the question: “How would Butterfly and Pinkerton communicate?” All Japanese roles were sung in Japanese by Japanese-American artists and all American roles were sung in English. San Francisco Classical Voice described the production as “on a visual scale beyond anything it has taken on before – a sumptuously costumed, fully staged, bilingual co-production... Pacific Opera Project deserves a great deal of credit for making this concept into a reality… innovative, creative, and immensely successful.”
POP presented the 2018 west coast premiere of Giacomo Rossini’s rarely performed 1816 opera, La gazzetta “The Newspaper.” The first performances in the US were given in Boston at the New England Conservatory in 2013, and POP's production was only the second in North America. Opera Today raved about the premiere, writing “Director Josh Shaw has invested the proceedings with enough good comic ideas for at least three productions. Shaw has set the show in 1960’s Paris, with eye-popping set elements and brilliant uses of color which add to the manic feel...Mr. Shaw has fashioned a take-no-prisoners approach to the staging, which was rife with clever touches… Pacific Opera Project has evidently hit on a winning formula for a night out, serving up food, drink and an operatic discovery in equal measure.”
POP has been dedicated to reaching young audiences with performance and education since its inception, regularly performing for school-aged groups in family-friendly productions of The Mikado, The Barber of Seville, Sweeney Todd, Cosi fan tutte, Gianni Schicchi, L'enfant et les sortilèges, and La bohème. POP has ongoing internships with Occidental College and collaborates with their Glee Club every other year, as well as internships with The Waverly School and Orange County School of the Arts. POP also partners with the Burbank Boys and Girls Club. During the COVID-19 pandemic, POP created interactive Education Packs appropriate for kindergarten to eighth grade students to accompany videos of POP’s productions of The Magic Flute and Madama Butterfly. Learn more at www.pacificoperaproject.com.
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*Photo at the top of release by Martha Benedict.
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