Pacific Opera Project Announces New Permanent Residence In Highland Park: POP HQ AKA “The POPera Shop”

After 12 years of pop-up performances and nomadic operations at locations around Los Angeles, Pacific Opera Project (POP) has a new permanent residence in Highland Park. Located at 125 S. Avenue 57, POP HQ AKA "The POPera Shop" is next door to (and owned by) one of POP's most beloved venues, The Highland Park Ebell Club, where POP will host two productions per season, in addition to its signature pop-up performances at venues throughout Los Angeles.

It will also function as a multi-purpose facility housing office space, storage space, a rehearsal hall, audition space, and more. Plans are already in place for after school programming and summer kids camps, as well as small performances. POP aspires for the building to become a hub for the Los Angeles arts community, hosting rehearsals, recording sessions, and meetings for other organizations and ensembles.

"This is a giant step in the history of Pacific Opera Project, as we put down permanent roots in our community and provide a fully professional and comfortable venue for our artists and staff," said POP Artistic Director, Josh Shaw.

The POPera Shop will host its first public event on Wednesday, April 26, 2023 at 6:30 p.m. with POP's biggest fundraising party of the year, POPaganza. The event features POP's announcement of the 2023-2024 season along with a catered dinner and drinks, performances by POP artists, and an exclusive first chance to purchase season tickets.

Pacific Opera Project's final performances of the 2022-23 season include The Magic Flute AKA #Superflute from March 17 to 26, 2023 at El Portal Theater, and Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance on May 19 to 28, 2023 outdoors at Forest Lawn Glendale.

Founded in 2011, Los Angeles's Pacific Opera Project (POP) is dedicated to providing quality opera that is accessible, affordable, and entertaining in order to build a broader audience for the art form. LA Magazine writes "If you think you hate opera, you've probably never seen a Pacific Opera Project show." POP's regularly sold out performances take place in a wide variety of venues, from outdoors, to small clubs, big amphitheaters, and warehouses. LA Weekly named POP the "Best Opera Company in Los Angeles" in 2018, writing "making opera cool, affordable, accessible and enticing to young audiences is easier said than done. It's also something every opera company in the country is trying desperately to do... [Pacific Opera Project] is not trying desperately to be hip. It just is." In 2020, POP was awarded The American Prize in Opera Performance.

POP has presented more than 40 innovative new productions to date, including revolutionary drive-in productions of COVID fan tutte and the US staged premieres of two Gluck operas in November 2020, about which Opera Magazine wrote "Despite this plague year of postponements, POP has refused to bow to the pandemic or its restrictions...There is surely no opera company in this Covid-ravaged country with a better average for 2020." Other critically acclaimed productions include Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio set as an episode of Star Trek; a "fan-tastic" (LA Daily News) Harajuku-themed Mikado; a Dick Tracy Don Giovanni; a Magic Flute inspired by 1990s video games, called "one of the freshest takes on Mozart's 1791 classic I have come across" (Operawire); and many more. POP's signature take on Puccini's La bohème, "AKA The Hipsters," set in modern day Los Angeles, has become a holiday tradition, returning year after year to sold-out audiences and called "riotous" (LA Weekly) and "an undeniably fun night at the theater that should not be missed" (Stage Raw). POP gave the world premiere of Brooke deRosa's The Monkey's Paw in 2017.

POP has been dedicated to reaching young audiences with performance and education since its inception, regularly performing for school-aged groups in family-friendly productions, including having a presence in 15 Title 1 schools. POP also partners with Bob Baker Marionette Theater, local YMCAs, and the Burbank Boys and Girls Club. During the COVID-19 pandemic, POP created interactive Education Packs appropriate for kindergarten to eighth grade students to accompany videos of POP's productions of The Magic Flute and Madama Butterfly.

In 2019, POP presented its most ambitious project to date: the first ever true-to-story bilingual Madama Butterfly performed in LA's Little Tokyo. A co-production with Houston's Opera in the Heights, the production featured a new libretto written by POP's Founding Artistic Director Josh Shaw and Opera in the Heights Artistic Director Eiki Isomura, presenting Puccini's story as if it actually happened and attempting to answer the question: "How would Butterfly and Pinkerton communicate?" All Japanese roles were sung in Japanese by Japanese-American artists and all American roles were sung in English. San Francisco Classical Voice described the production as "on a visual scale beyond anything it has taken on before - a sumptuously costumed, fully staged, bilingual co-production... Pacific Opera Project deserves a great deal of credit for making this concept into a reality... innovative, creative, and immensely successful."

POP presented the 2018 West Coast premiere of Giacomo Rossini's rarely performed 1816 opera, La gazzetta "The Newspaper." The first performances in the US were given in Boston at the New England Conservatory in 2013, and POP's production was only the second in North America. Opera Today raved about the premiere, writing "Director Josh Shaw has invested the proceedings with enough good comic ideas for at least three productions. Shaw has set the show in 1960's Paris, with eye-popping set elements and brilliant uses of color which add to the manic feel... Mr. Shaw has fashioned a take-no-prisoners approach to the staging, which was rife with clever touches... Pacific Opera Project has evidently hit on a winning formula for a night out, serving up food, drink and an operatic discovery in equal measure."

Learn more at www.pacificoperaproject.com.

To post a comment, you must register and login.