Courtney Love Will Lead KANSAS CITY CHOIR BOY Opera at Prototype Festival

According to the New York Times, musician Courtney Love will soon star in Todd Almond's new opera KANSAS CITY CHOIR BOY, which will premiere at Prototype 2015. The production will run January 7-17.

Love told NYT: "I love the concept, and I'm loving the music. I'm playing it constantly. I'm looking to do things that are different. I just finished a rock tour of Australia, and it was great, but I've been doing that for a long time. I wanted to do something challenging."

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Kansas City Choir Boy is a theatricalized concept album, here presented in a premiere presentation, about explosive young love tested by cruel fate, told in a series of mysterious flashbacks. A boy and a girl in small town America, united in their outsiderness and intense love for each other, get separated when one goes in search of greater mystery. Borrowing themes from ancient myth and music from the dance floor, the show features composer Todd Almond at the keyboard and on vocals, along with a fiery cast, a string quartet, a computer musician/DJ, and immersive video projections. Directed by Kevin Newbury, Kansas City Choir Boy is epic and romantic, a love-story for the music-video age and a love-child of the 24-hour news cycle that feeds on the stories of the anonymous "missing."

PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now is the annual festival of visionary opera-theatre and music-theatre works by pioneering artists from New York City and around the world, co-produced by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE.

The third edition of PROTOTYPE, running from January 8-17, will feature two world premiere co-productions-composer Stefan Weisman and librettist David Cote's The Scarlet Ibis, a dreamy contemporary family opera that weaves puppetry into its story-telling, and Korean-American artist Bora Yoon's multimedia music-theatre work, Sunken Cathedral, which takes the audience on a sonic journey of deep psychological impact. The festival also includes Toxic Psalms, an international co-presentation with Slovenian vocal theatre company Carmina Slovenica and St. Ann's Warehouse; Kansas City Choir Boy, a theatricalized concept album by Todd Almond, at HERE; two work-in-progress presentations of Beth Morrison Projects operas in development: Winter's Child, by Ellen Reid and Amanda Jane Shank, co-presented with Trinity Wall Street, and Aging Magician, by Paola Prestini, Rinde Eckert, and Julian Crouch, co-presented with Park Avenue Armory and Opera America's New Works Forum; and a one-night-only performance by Timur and the Dime Museum at Joe's Pub.

Photo Credit: Jennifer Broski

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