Long Beach Opera Announces Four Upcoming 2022 Productions

Long Beach Opera has programmed four upcoming performances and events - including two new productions as originally announced -- Giustino by G.F. Handel at the sculpture garden and within the galleries at Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) directed by Artistic Director James Darrah and conducted by Music Director Christopher Rountree, with new adaptations and arrangements by composer Shelley Washington on May 21, 22, and 28; followed by The Central Park Five by Anthony Davis & Richard Wesley conducted by Anthony Parnther at Jordan Auditorium in Long Beach on June 18, 19 and 25. The Central Park Five was selected as the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Music after its premiere at Long Beach Opera.

These will be followed by two weekends of presentations. On the weekend of July 16th and 17th, LBO will present the inaugural Long Beach Opera Film Festival at the Art Theatre Long Beach, featuring a full program of opera films including a world premiere, talks, and live performances. Then on an additional weekend in July, dates announced shortly, LBO will present a weekend of immersive performances.

LBO's first Opera Film Festival features existing films made for opera that have not yet had a theatrical release or screening, along with the world premiere of the short film Entry, produced by Long Beach Opera. The film festival will run for two full days and will include live performances and panel discussions throughout the weekend. Current subscribers will have "all-access passes "for the entire weekend of events, and can select which events they wish to attend, or attend the two full days of events."

The Immersive Performance project is still in the planning stages and will be announced shortly.

Giustino, which will be performed at the Museum of Latin American Art both in the sculpture garden and within the galleries, stars Anna Schubert, Orson Van Gay, Luke Elmer, Marlaina Owens, Sharon Kim, Amanda Lynn Bottoms, Dante Mireles and Douglas Williams, with production design by Adam Rigg, and lighting design by Pablo Santiago, with associate production designer Kate and associate director Raviv Ullman. Musica Angelica serves as the orchestra.

The Central Park Five by Anthony Davis & Richard Wesley will be conducted by Anthony Parnther and performed at Jordan Auditorium in Long Beach. The performances star many from the original 2019 Long Beach Opera cast including Bernard Holcomb, Cedric Berry, Orson Van Gay, Ashley Faatoalia, Joelle Lamarre and Lindsay Patterson, and will also feature several new cast members including Justin Ryan, Todd Strange, Lacey Jo Benter, Jose Maldonato, William Powell III and Corey Estelle.

Long Beach Opera will take the month of April to reset due to recent events and to restructure internally. The company will be implementing additional systems to support an inclusive, thoughtful environment for all. LBO will not be presenting Quando on April 23rd and 24th as previously announced but will instead be adding the two new events in July.

Subscriptions, flex-passes (for two or three operas) and single tickets remain on sale at longbeachopera.org. More information about all of LBO's 2022 season offerings including full cast and creative listings will be made available soon at this site.

Handel's rarely-performed Giustino with new music and arrangements by Shelley Washington is conceived of and directed by LBO's Artistic Director and visionary James Darrah and conducted by LBO's Music Director Christopher Rountree. In this new version and production, Handel's glorious music and surprisingly relevant drama re-emerges as a site specific, cinematically driven, wild contemporary party. A story of fate, destiny, long lost familial relationships and a probing exploration of "conquerors" and their captors, LBO's Giustino will elevate the ambiguities of gender already present in baroque opera and examine how stereotypes can be shattered even in the most traditional stories.

The libretto and score will be taken apart and reassembled by Darrah, Rountree and exciting young composer Shelley Washington, who will also create some new music for the piece.

Darrah's breakthrough stylistic hybrid of cinema-theater recontextualizes the salon-like qualities of Handel's 18th century work to a transitory, temporal space, further challenging the current norms of 21st century classical music consumption. The action of the scenes will move amongst the audience and to different parts of the location and will be live-filmed to create a film within an opera--playing at all times.

Just as spectators did during the time of Handel, the audience will be encouraged to truly revel in the decadence and transcendence of Handel's glorious music without the trappings of traditional, staid classical music performances.

Darrah said, "I've always wanted to explore Handel's potent dramaturgy and incredible stage works through the lens of cinema--and merge that with live performance to allow them to take life in more exuberant and less-precious ways. I've long been infatuated with Handel's operas but so often have wished I could do even more with them--and I feel ready to reject the staid, turgid experience of sitting through endless da capo arias in a proscenium theater. The potential to craft layered, nuanced performances with the cast through incorporating cinematography as a tool within the form is wholly exciting and I strongly feel it represents the future of opera's potential. Giustino is the perfect piece to embrace this new-type of operatic experience: one that emphatically embraces film and media as a tool to embed within Handel's bold creation, as well as a canvas for the talents of Shelley Washington and Christopher Rountree to work together with me to craft a raucous celebration and sensorial, media-rich experience."

Back by popular demand and increasing societal relevance, The Central Park Five will return to Long Beach Opera in a brand new presentation. The harrowing account of five teenagers wrongfully convicted, incarcerated and eventually exonerated remains a devastatingly relevant indictment on racial injustices in America. LBO's 2019 world premiere of the opera brought composer and "national treasure" (opera news) Anthony Davis additional recognition when the score was selected for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Music. "Davis' supercharged score grippingly conveys the claustrophobia of a racist legal system and society from which there was, for these five innocent boys and their families, no exit." (LA Times).

After the critical acclaim of the world premiere, LBO brings back this important, lauded work, featuring many of the original cast members along with some new additions, reinvigorating the story of the five innocent Black teenagers falsely accused and convicted of a crime. Anthony Parnther, who was recently lauded by the Los Angeles Times for leading a "superb performance" of Mr. Davis's work "Restless Morning," will conduct the Pulitzer Prize winning score.

The inaugural LBO Film Festival will take place over the weekend of July 9th and 10th at the Art Theatre in Long Beach and will feature a unique selection of operatic works made specifically for the medium of film. The 2022 LBO Film Festival will run for two full days, and will include film screenings, live performances, panel discussions, and local business and restaurant collaborations throughout the weekend. Current subscribers will have "all-access passes" for the entire weekend of events, and can select which events they wish to attend, or choose to attend the two full days. The lineup will include a variety of artists exploring the overlapping worlds of opera and film and feature the projects of unique filmmakers, dancers, composers, and opera singers, including the world premiere of the LBO commissioned short film Entry. The festival will also include several works that have not yet had a theatrical release or public screening.

Heralded by the Wall Street Journal as "experimenting and forging a new art form", Artistic Director James Darrah's unique focus on the intersection of opera and film has been praised by the LA Times as "blow[ing] up an old art form for the 'Insecure' generation" and will now have an annual home in the first LBO Film Festival- a trailblazing two day series of curated screenings, premieres and events celebrating the cinematic exploration of opera's boundary-breaking collision with film with a wide array of collaborations from film, television and opera creatives.

The full roster of screenings, artists and daily schedules, along with details about LBO's fourth immersive project, will be announced soon.

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