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Pacific Opera Project Announces 2021-2022 Season
For Immediate Release
Contact: Katy Salomon | Morahan Arts & Media
katy@morahanartsandmedia.com | 863.660.2214
Pacific Opera Project Announces 2021-2022 Season
Four Fairytale Themed Operas: La Cenerentola, Hansel and Gretel, Iolanta, and Into the Woods
“In this strange time and strange place and strange way, the pandemic has
made POP matter in a telling new way.” – Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles, CA (July 12, 2021) — Pacific Opera Project (POP), known for “making opera cool, affordable, accessible and enticing" (LA Weekly), announces its 2021-2022 season, featuring four fairytale-themed operas – La Cenerentola, Hansel and Gretel, Iolanta, and Into the Woods. The in-person season follows an unprecedented year and a half, in which Pacific Opera Project presented wildly popular watch parties, drive-in U.S. premieres, and the first in-person performance to return in all of LA County.
On Friday, August 27, 2021 at 8:00pm, the season opens with POP’s return to The Ford Amphitheatre for La Cenerentola, Rossini’s charming take on the Cinderella story. In partnership with the LA Philharmonic, the opera will be sung in Italian with English subtitles and a 25-piece orchestra led by Kristin Roach. In this version of the fairytale, the wicked stepmother is a stepfather, Don Magnifico (E. Scott Levin), and Cenerentola (Stephanie Doche) is forced to serve as the maid in her own home. Prince Ramiro (Arnold Livingston Geis) is looking for a bride so he disguises his valet Dandini (Joel Balzun) as a beggar and Cenerentola shows him kindness, proving her good heartedness. After refusing to fall for the wiles of Cenerentola's step-sisters and stepfather, Ramiro wins her heart with a matching bracelet and they marry. The cast also includes Andrew Allan Hiers as Alidoro, Meagan Martin as Tisbe, and Chelsea Lehnea as Clorinda.
POP returns to one of its favorite venues, Forest Lawn Glendale for an outdoor, family-friendly production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel on Saturday, November 13, 2021 at 5:00pm; Sunday, November 14, 2021 at 5:00pm; Saturday, November 20, 2021 at 5:00pm; and Sunday, November 21, 2021 at 5:00pm. Sung in English, with orchestra, the Grimm brothers-inspired fairytale will feature Erin Alford as Hansel and Emily Rosenberg as Gretel. With a 2-hour runtime and a 5:00pm curtain, this is the perfect introduction to opera for children and families. Table seating available for picnicking before and during the show.
Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta comes to the 800-seat Aratani Theatre on Sunday, March 20, 2022 at 3:00pm; Saturday, March 26, 2022 at 7:30pm; and Sunday, March 27, 2022 at 3:00pm with a 32-piece orchestra led by Isaac Selya, of Queen City Opera. Cristina Jones, dubbed The Blind Soprano, stars in the opera’s title role about a princess who is unaware that she is blind. The cast also includes POP favorites Andrew and Megan Potter as King René and Martha and Adam Cioffari as Ibn-Hakia. POP will partner with low-sight organizations for this production to encourage awareness and to amplify their efforts. Iolanta will be POP’s first opera presented in Russian and the Los Angeles staged premiere of the opera.
The season closes with Sondheim’s Into the Woods in May 2022 with specific dates and venues to be announced. What better show to end a fairytale season than the one that brings all the characters together? Stephen Sondheim’s Tony Award-winning musical takes favorite fairytale characters and brings them together for a timeless, yet relevant piece.
Performance Information
La Cenerentola, in Partnership with the LA Philharmonic
Friday, August 27, 2021 at 8:00pm
Ford Amphitheatre | 2580 Cahuenga Blvd E. | Los Angeles, CA 90068
Tickets: $20-80
Link: http://bit.ly/POPCenerentola
Rossini – La Cenerentola
Sung in Italian with English subtitles
Cast:
Stephanie Doche, Cenerentola
E. Scott Levin, Don Magnifico
Arnold Livingston Geis, Prince Ramiro
Joel Balzun, Dandini
Andrew Allan Hiers, Alidoro
Meagan Martin, Tisbe
Chelsea Lehnea, Clorinda
Josh Shaw, Director and Designer
Kristin Roach, Conductor
Hansel and Gretel
Saturday, November 13, 2021 at 5:00pm
Sunday, November 14, 2021 at 5:00pm
Friday, November 19, 2021 at 7:00pm
Saturday, November 20, 2021 at 5:00pm
Sunday, November 21, 2021 at 5:00pm
Forest Lawn Glendale | 1712 S Glendale Ave | Glendale, CA 91205
Tickets: Available August 27; Table and regular seating.
Link: www.pacificoperaproject.com/
Humperdinck – Hansel and Gretel
Sung in English with projected subtitles
Cast:
Erin Alford, Hansel
Emily Rosenberg, Gretel
Josh Shaw, Director and Designer
Iolanta
Sunday, March 20, 2022 at 3:00pm
Saturday, March 26, 2022 at 7:30pm
Sunday, March 27, 2022 at 3:00pm
Aratani Theatre | 244 San Pedro St. | Los Angeles, CA 90012
Tickets: Available August 27
Link: www.pacificoperaproject.com/
Tchaikovsky – Iolanta
Sung in Russian with projected English subtitles
Cast:
Cristina Jones, soprano
Andrew Potter, King René
Megan Potter, Martha
Adam Cioffari, Ibn-Hakia
Josh Shaw, Director and Designer
Isaac Selya, Conductor
Into the Woods
May 2022
Link: www.pacificoperaproject.com/
Sondheim – Into the Woods
Sung in English
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 amphitheaters, 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 40 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, about which Opera Magazine wrote “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.” Other critically acclaimed productions include 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.
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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