Bright Shiny Things Releases Eat the Document, an Opera About Radical Action and Consequences by Composer John Glover With Libretto by Kelley Rourke

BRIGHT SHINY THINGS RELEASES EAT THE DOCUMENT, AN OPERA ABOUT RADICAL ACTION AND CONSEQUENCES BY COMPOSER JOHN GLOVER WITH LIBRETTO BY KELLEY ROURKE 

Based on the novel by Dana Spiotta and developed in collaboration with music director Mila Henry and director Kristin Marting

“The Prototype Festival is a place for music-theater pieces that defy categorization. Eat the Document… is a case in point. John Glover’s score, which takes many of its cues from pop and rock music of the 1970s and 1990s, is like a concept album, shaped into a compelling narrative by Kelley Rourke’s smart, well-distilled libretto.”
–The Wall Street Journal

NEW YORK, NY–On May 22, 2026, Bright Shiny Things releases Eat the Document [BSTD-0245], an opera composed by John Glover with libretto by Kelley Rourke, based on the novel by Dana Spiotta. Recorded live as part of the 2025 PROTOTYPE Festival at New York’s HERE Arts Center, the opera takes place both in the 1970s, when the most radical act in the lives of two leftists has tragic unintended consequences, and in the 1990s, when they are seen living out the new identities their action forced them to assume. Developed in collaboration with music director Mila Henry and stage director Kristin Marting, the opera features Danielle Buonaiuto and Tim Russell as the young activists alongside Amy Justman and Paul Pinto as their older counterparts, as well as Natalie Trumm, Paul Chwe MinChul An, Michael Kuhn, and Adrienne Danrich. Eat the Document is available for pre-order here.

Dana Spiotta’s novel Eat the Document weaves references to pop music throughout the text as a tool to delineate character. As the creators say in the liner notes: “One of our great challenges — and delights — in writing this opera was figuring out how to channel the energy of Dana’s musical references to create original ‘pop’ songs that sit within the larger musical architecture of the piece.” Glover and Rourke devised a vocabulary that partakes of contemporary musical theater and opera while paying homage to the pop music that infuses the novel, especially The Beach Boys, references to whom echo in different ways throughout the work’s music and text.

Set in the early 1970s and late 1990s, Eat the Document explores the connection between the two eras, not only in terms of music, but also activism, language, and technology. A small ensemble portrays a variety of characters in both time periods, and Marting had the inspiration of recasting the younger versions of the main protagonists as other characters in the later time period, as an added layer of conversation across the eras. The team began their work on the opera in 2019, feeling that the conversation about activism was “almost unbearably relevant,” without realizing that with each passing year before the eventual premiere it would become exponentially more so. They explain: 

“In the time since then, each day’s news has brought fresh horror — a global pandemic, fighting in Ukraine and Gaza, mass shootings that have become an everyday occurrence, the widening chasm between rich and poor. How do we exist within a broken system? What obligation — and what power — does any individual have to confront and change systems that lead to suffering?” 

Eat the Document received a 2021 commissioning grant from the New York State Council on the Arts; development support from Milwaukee Opera Theater and American Opera Projects; and a 2024 residency at Baryshnikov Arts Center.

TRACK LIST:

John Glover, music; Kelley Rourke, libretto
Eat the Document

1 No More
2 It Wasn't Supposed to Go Down That Way
3 My Name Is Caroline
4 Garage Sale Finds
5 On Repeat
6 Prairie Fire
7 Unsustainable
8 Anyone Else?
9 Did It Ever Occur to You
10 That's All the Time We Have
11 Unyielding
12 Nixon/Nut Loaf
13 Write On
14 Men
15 Don't Try to Contact Me
16 Global Village/Blow It Up
17 Because We Like to Dance
18 Smells
19 Thank You for Dinner
20 Plastic
21 Anything Can Be Mine
22 Sonsplaining
23 I Met Dennis Wilson Once
24 My Mother
25 You Have No Right
26 Lost Love Movie
27 I'm Calling This Meeting to Order
28 Parasites/A Veneer of Normalcy
29 Nicknames Are for Friends
30 Cooking Class
31 You Control What People Believe to Be True
32 How Did You Find This Group Again?
33 What Are You Thinking?
34 My Mother Is Not Just My Mother
35 Look, Berry
36 Early Morning
37 Leave the Memory Behind
38 New Year's Eve
39 And What Does Miranda Want with Me?
40 Green for What Is Seen
41 Unraveling/No More

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

John Glover creates music for concert, opera, dance, and theater. He has received commissions from organizations and artists including Houston Grand Opera, On Site Opera, The New York Youth Symphony, Washington National Opera, Milwaukee Opera Theatre, American Conservatory Theater, Mirror Visions Ensemble, Adam Tendler, Sasha Cooke, Cherry Valley Artworks, and the Five Boroughs Music Festival. His work has been presented in venues ranging from Rockwood Music Hall to Carnegie Hall, The Invisible Dog to the Rothko Chapel. John has received awards, fellowships and grants for his music from organizations including New Music USA, Meet The Composer, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Cambodia Living Arts, Cherry Valley Artworks, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. In addition to his work as a composer, John serves as the Director of Artistic Planning for Kaufman Music Center. 

Kelley Rourke’s libretti include Eat the Document, Right Now, Lucy, and Stay (John Glover); The Beekeeper (Wang Lu); The Emissary (Kenji Oh); Jungle Book (Kamala Sankaram); Wilde Tales and And Still We Dream (Laura Karpman);Odyssey and Robin Hood (Ben Moore); A River Runs Through It (Matt Foss, Zach Redler) and O’Keeffe: Kiss the Sky (Christopher Tin). Kelley is the recipient of Opera America’s 2024 Campbell Opera Librettist Prize. Her English adaptations of canonic works have been hailed as “crackingly witty” (The Independent, London) and “remarkably well wedded to the music” (New York Times). Her work has been commissioned and performed by the Metropolitan Opera, English National Opera, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Opera Australia, Welsh National Opera, Washington National Opera, PROTOTYPE Festival, The Glimmerglass Festival, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Opera Parallèle, Chicago Opera Theater, Minnesota Opera, Carnegie Hall, and Opera Montana, among many others.