http://www.theatricaloutfit.org/
On Saturday, January 24th I participated in the Atlanta Opera’s 24 Hour Opera Project. This cutting edge event assembles librettists, composers, directors, and singers in order to create a completely new composition of Opera, which is written, put to music, staged, memorized, and performed within 24 hours. This event was a great opportunity to test my ability as a performer to grasp the concept of a production, characterize it, internalize it, and memorize it in time for a quality performance in a limited time frame. The event was great fun, and within the cast of the production I was greeted with the faces of many local Atlanta artists, both familiar and foreign.
I worked under musical director Catherine Giel, (musical director for Capitol City Opera here in Atlanta) [http://www.ccityopera.org/], stage director Kristin Kenning (Samford University), and the musical composition was done by Marvin Carlton. The Libretto was written by Sumita Chakraborty, and was based upon the idea of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, (Shakespeare) in which each of the characters is enchanted with a flower which forces them to fall in love with the first person they see. This was extremely reminiscent for me, because the last time I performed in the Atlanta Theatrical Outlet (Pictured above) was when I performed as Demetrius in Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream this past summer in the Harrower Summer Opera Workshop. The twist of the production was that a very brightly colored ‘disco shirt’ had to be worked into the script, and the theme of the night was ‘Not For the Faint of Heart.’ So instead, each of our characters smelled the potion that had been cast upon the shirt causing us all to fall for whatever person- or item- they saw first. These items included a rubber chicken, a feather, a star, and lastly I was made to fall in love with myself upon seeing my reflection, and spent most of the production wallowing in the beauty of my own image. It was quite the comedy routine, and featured a wonderful cast, adaptation of the story to fit our needs, involved staging, and extremely catchy music which we all walked out humming!
http://clatl.com/atlanta/24-hour-opera-gets-fierce-and-funny/Content?oid=13249532
All in all it was a wonderful experience, and at the end of the performance there was a surprise performance by a hilarious improv comedy group from ‘Dad’s Garage’ theatrical group. I definitely recommend attempting to catch one of their shows, I haven’t laughed that hard in some time! (Link provided below)
