Heartbeat Opera Reveals Lineup For 10th Anniversary 2023-24 Season

New York's Heartbeat Opera has announced its Tenth Anniversary Season in 2023-24.

The season opens at Roulette on November 9 and 10 (three performances) with the return of Heartbeat Opera's annual Drag Opera Extravaganza. Entitled THE GOLDEN COCK, this new, original creation takes the framework of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's opera, The Golden Cockerel, and incorporates music by Rachmaninoff, Rossini, Meyerbeer, Tchaikovsky, Irving Berlin, and more, with arrangements by Heartbeat Opera's brilliant Music Director Daniel Schlosberg.

Later this spring, Heartbeat Opera returns to Baruch Performing Arts Center with its signature Spring Festival from April 2-14, 2024. The company will premiere a radically reimagined classic, EUGENE ONEGIN—and a boundary-pushing new commissioned opera, THE EXTINCTIONIST, which is Daniel Schlosberg's first-ever full-length opera. Schlosberg has long been the "secret sauce" of Heartbeat Opera's productions, and The Extinctionist offers a moment to celebrate his incredible work with Heartbeat Opera over the last decade. 

THE EXTINCTIONIST follows a young couple trying to have a baby. Ice caps are melting. Forests are burning. In the face of environmental collapse, one woman wonders if the best way to protect a future child is not to have one at all. It all goes according to plan until she discovers she has little choice in the matter. In this dark comedy, a woman’s body becomes a battleground of political anguish, conflicting desire, and existential dread.

Inside the ornamented drawing rooms of a buttoned-up society, three young outsiders flame into mismatched passion and combust, hurtling toward irreparable choices. Tchaikovsky’s long-suppressed queerness floods into every character of this propulsive drama, as they smash against one of the most romantic operatic scores in history. Heartbeat Opera's radical adaptation of EUGENE ONEGIN maps the composer’s own complex biography onto his characters and asks—how can we ever break free of the life we are born into?

THE GOLDEN COCK

Thurs, Nov 9 @ 7:30p — The Gala
Fri, Nov 10 @ 7p — The Early Show
Fri, Nov 10 @ 9:30p — The Late Show

Created by Nico Krell & Jacob Ashworth
Directed by Nico Krell
Arrangements by Daniel Schlosberg
Music Directed by Jacob Ashworth & Daniel Schlosberg
Costumes by David Quinn

Featuring:
Ariana Wehr - soprano
Sara Couden - contralto
Daniel Moody - countertenor
Elliott Paige - tenor
John Taylor Ward - bass

The disco balls have stopped spinning at the only gay club in St. Petersburg, and there’s time for one last bedtime story. It’s Queers versus Kremlin tonight in an eye-popping, ear-thrilling battle replete with ambrosial arias, rude roosters, and a dacha full of divas. Don your dress, down your vodka, and dream dirty at Heartbeat Opera’s frisky riff on Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel.

Heartbeat's drag extravaganzas always reimagine classic opera, but The Golden Cock is the closest they have come to making an adaptation of a full opera into a drag show. Rimsky-Korsakov’s original is a fantastical tale about a hapless but war-mongering tsar who sets off towards the West with his army at the slightest crow of “danger!” from his golden cockerel. He becomes enchanted by a foreign queen who ends up seducing him, returning with him, and taking over his empire. Heartbeat Opera's version turns the fantastical into the fabulous, with costumes by one of New York’s most celebrated designers, David Quinn — known for his work with artists such as Bridget Everett and Darrel Thorne. With a cast of returning Heartbeat favorites, The Golden Cock marks Heartbeat's most ambitious—and operatic—drag extravaganza yet.

Heartbeat's Spring Festival

April 2-14, 2024
Baruch Performing Arts Center

THE EXTINCTIONIST

April 3, 5, 7, 10, 12, 14
A new 75 minute one-act opera, sung in English. 
Music by Daniel Schlosberg 
Libretto by Amanda Quaid
Originally Conceived with Louisa Proske
Directed by Shadi Ghaheri
Music Directed by Daniel Schlosberg
Cast TBA

The Extinctionist, the first opera by Heartbeat Opera's Music Director Daniel Schlosberg, follows the story of a woman making a difficult decision—to bear a child or not to, in the face of climate change—contending with the choices that are available to her. With a libretto by Amanda Quaid and music by Daniel Schlosberg, The Extinctionist feels even more prescient in the face of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Shadi Ghaheri returns as director after her extremely successful run as director of Heartbeat Opera's TOSCA at the 2023 Spring Festival, which The Wall Street Journal characterized as "clever" and Opera News described as "vital" and "seamlessly tailored." The Exctinctionist was originally workshopped in 2021 at PS21, and received a feature in The New York Times.

The Exctinctionist marks James Stevenson and Lunafest Prize-winning writer, actor, and teacher Amanda Quaid's first opera libretto, and is an outstanding addition to her prolific writing career. Her work as a playwright, which she began in 2018, has been lauded on off-Broadway stages, and her screenplays have received widespread recognition at Oscar-qualifying festivals across the country.

EUGENE ONEGIN

April 2, 4, 6, 7, 11, 13
A new 100 minute adaptation, sung in Russian.
Co-Adapted by Dustin Wills and Jacob Ashworth
Directed by Dustin Wills
Music Directed by Jacob Ashworth
Newly arranged by Daniel Schlosberg
Cast TBA

Heartbeat Opera's adaptation of Tchaikovsky's classic opera, Eugene Onegin, looks at romance and friendship through the lens of Tchaikovsky’s suppressed queerness. The desires of all three main characters—Onegin, Tatyana, and Lensky—are warped and transmuted by the pressure of their society, so that they resist definition even as they demand expression. A series of only recently uncensored letters give a fuller, clearer insight into the oppression Tchaikovsky faced for his sexuality.

Excerpt of a letter from Tchaikovsky to his younger brother
September 28, 1876 (Moscow):

"Can you understand how it kills me to think that people who love me can sometimes feel ashamed of me! It’s happened a hundred times. What I want is to get married or openly have an affair with a woman in order the shut the mouths of all those scum. Since my letters to you I’ve already given way three times to my proclivities. Only the other day I made a trip to the village where Bulatov lives, and fell madly in love with his coachman. So you’re quite right when you say that people are totally incapable of not yielding to their weaknesses."

This reimagining of Eugene Onegin comes at a time in which many Russian artists are being forced to flee the country or to live under terrifying risk. In Heartbeat’s hands, Tchaikovsky’s psychological masterpiece becomes an acute expression of the impossibility of liberation and acceptance that remains true even in our most progressive societies today. 

This production marks the major New York opera debut for director Dustin Wills, who recently won the Lucille Lortel award for directing for Wolf Play. He has directed many plays, including Frontières Sans Frontiéres, which was named in The New York Times' Top Ten Theatrical Productions of 2017 and was a Time Out New York Critics Pick, and Plano, which was called "rare theater magic" by Austin's Sightlines Magazine.

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