POP Presents West Coast Premiere of 'Don Bucefalo,' Nov 2-10

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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Adrienne Andisheh, Sounding Point
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TJ Sclafani, Sounding Point
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PACIFIC OPERA PROJECT PRESENTS
WEST COAST PREMIERE OF
DON BUCEFALO

POP’s New Site-Specific Production at
the Oldest Italian Society Venue in America

Nov 2 & 3; 8, 9 & 10, 2024;
The Garibaldina Society, Los Angeles, CA

Los Angeles, CA — Pacific Opera Project (POP) presents the West Coast premiere of Antonio Cagnoni’s Don Bucefalo on Saturday, November 2, 2024 at 7:30PM; Sunday, November 3, 2024 at 3:00PM; Friday, November 8, 2024 at 7:30PM; Saturday, November 9, 2024 at 7:30PM; and Sunday, November 10 at 3:00PM at the Garibaldina Society in Los Angeles. This site-specific production, directed by POP Artistic Director Josh Shaw and conducted by Kyle Naig, will be the first time Don Bucefalo has been performed in the United States since its US premiere in 1867, where it was produced by the Maretzek Italian Opera Company at the former Academy of Music in New York City.

A dramma giocoso (or “drama with jokes”), Cagnoni’s Don Bucefalo is a comedy of errors where the title character, a composer and impresario, decides to produce an opera featuring local townspeople after teaching them how to sing. An opera buffo lost to time, the New York Musical Gazette said it “[promised] to become a decided favorite” in their review of the Oct 18, 1867 performance. As with most European composers, Cagnoni, who was a student of Donizetti, was more well known in his native Italy, and his work did not have much cross-over appeal with American audiences at the time. POP’s production of Don Bucefalo changes the setting from 19th-century Italy to 1968 Los Angeles, the heyday of the Garibaldina Society, where the Italian-American elites of Hollywood rubbed shoulders with the hoi polloi.

“I specifically went searching for an opera that would fit in perfectly at the Garibaldina, and somewhere — ten pages down the Google search results — I stumbled on Don Bucefalo,” said Artistic Director Josh Shaw. “The music is so fun, and exactly what I love directing. You'll hear Donizetti and Rossini throughout. I've updated the show to 1968, the opening year of the clubhouse. The building is the setting of the opera — no sets needed. I want audiences to come and step back in time with us. The retro charm of the Garibaldina is something very special, and I can't wait to introduce our audience to that instant nostalgia.”

One of the first mutual-aid societies for Italian immigrants in America, the Garibaldina Society is the oldest Italian club in Los Angeles, when it was founded as the Società Garibaldina di Mutua Beneficenza in 1877. The Garibaldina has received renewed interest in recent years after opening up membership to non-Italians in 2017, and after Nicole Infante, previously of Frederick’s of Hollywood, became president in 2022. The Garibaldina recently received praise from the LA Times, where the club was called an “absolute delight.”

“The Garibaldina is so excited to be presenting a production of Don Bucefalo with Pacific Opera Project - a project one year in the making,” says Infante. “We couldn’t be more thrilled to collaborate with such a talented group of upcoming opera stars, while providing the Garidbaldina’s legendary Italian charm…and pasta. This will truly be a collaboration for the history books!”

Cast members for Don Bucefalo include baritone Armando Contreras (Kentucky Opera, Glimmerglass Festival) as Don Bucefalo; soprano Veronique Filloux (Wolf Trap Opera, Arizona Opera) as Rosa; tenor Eric Botto (Chautauqua Opera, Opera Southwest) as Count Belprato; tenor Dominic Salvati (Opera San Luis Obispo) as Carlino; baritone Joel Balzun (LA Opera, Santa Fe Opera) as Don Bomba; mezzo-soprano Erin Alford (Florida Grand Opera, Opera San José) as Agata; and soprano Mariah Rae (Overtone Industries, Lyric Opera of Orange County) as Gianetta.

Tickets for Don Bucefalo start at $15 and can be purchased at pacificoperaproject.com. This production offers table and general seating, with an optional Italian dinner add-on complete with pasta, salad, and wine.

CALENDAR EDITORS PLEASE NOTE:
PACIFIC OPERA PROJECTS PRESENTS DON BUCEFALO
Who: Pacific Opera Project
When: Saturday, November 2, 2024 at 7:30PM; Sunday, November 3, 2024 at 3:00PM; Friday, November 8, 2024 at 7:30PM; Saturday, November 9, 2024 at 7:30PM; Sunday, November 10 at 3:00PM
Where: The Garibaldina; 4533 N Figueroa St, Los Angeles, CA 90065
Cast: Armando Contreras as Don Bucefalo, Veronique Filloux as Rosa, Eric Botto as Count Belprato, Dominic Salvati as Carlino, Joel Balzun as Don Bomba, Erin Alford as Agata & Mariah Rae as Gianetta
Creative Team: Josh Shaw, director; Kyle Naig, conductor; and Hailey Springer, costume design

About Pacific Opera Project
Founded in 2011, Los Angeles’s Pacific Opera Project (POP) is dedicated to providing quality opera that is accessible, 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.

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, including having a presence in 15 Title 1 schools. POP also partners with Bob Baker Marionette Theater, local YMCAs, and 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.

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’s Founding 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.”

Learn more at www.pacificoperaproject.com.

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