Pacific Opera Project Presents US Premiere Production Of ERCOLE SU'L TERMODONTE

Pacific Opera Project (POP) presents the US premiere production of the rare Vivaldi opera, Ercole su'l Termodonte, almost 300 years to the day from its original premiere with eight performances at The Highland Park Ebell Club from Friday, January 6, 2023 to Saturday, January 21, 2023.

The Ebell Club will once again be completely transformed, this time redesigned as an 18th-century Baroque opera house, complete with box seating. To view a 3D rendering of the opera house build-out, click here.

Based on the ninth labor of Hercules, where Hercules is tasked with capturing the sword of Antiope, the queen of the Amazons, Ercole su'l Termodonte was only recently discovered in libraries in Münster, Paris, and Turino. The original 1723 opera, written during the Pope's ban on women in opera, employed seven castrati and one tenor during its premiere in Rome. POP's production, in the making since 2019, will feature a mix of countertenors, mezzos, tenors, and sopranos performing these roles with a period orchestra, also in costume, and led by conductor Kyle Naig on the harpsichord.

Cast members include tenor Logan Webber (Scalia/Ginsberg with Maryland Opera Studio, Peter Grimes at The Princeton Festival) as Ercole, soprano Janet Todd (Madama Butterfly with POP and Opera Columbus) as Ippolita, mezzo-soprano Meagan Martin (The Barber of Seville and Carmen with POP) as Antiope, countertenor Michael Skarke (L'incoronazione di Poppea with Haymarket Opera, All Night Vigil with PaTRAM Male Chorus) as Alceste, countertenor Kyle Tingzon (Harvey Milk Reimagined and The Magic Flute with Opera Theatre of St. Louis) as Teseo, tenor Manfred Anaya (La Traviata with Dayton Opera, The Queen of Spades with Des Moines Metro Opera) as Telemone, soprano Véronique Filloux (A Midsummer Night's Dream with Des Moines Metro Opera, Lakmé with Washington Concert Opera) as Martesia, and soprano Audrey Yoder (La Corona and Il Parnaso Confuso, Gianni Schicci, and L'enfant et les sortileges with POP) as Orizia. Artistic Director and POP co-founder, Josh Shaw, directs the production.

Additional productions in Pacific Opera Project's 2022-23 season include The Magic Flute AKA #Superflute, set in classic video games from the early 1990s, on March 17 to 26, 2023 at El Portal Theater; and Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance on May 19 to 28, 2023 outdoors on the lawn at the Heritage Square Museum.

Performance Details

ERCOLE SU'L TERMODONTE (US Premiere)
Pacific Opera Project
Friday, January 6, 2023 at 8:00pm
Saturday, January 7, 2023 at 7:00pm
Thursday, January 12, 2023 at 8:00pm
Saturday, January 14, 2023 at 2:00pm & 7:00pm
Friday, January 20, 2023 at 8:00pm
Saturday, January 21, 2023 at 2:00pm & 7:00pm
The Highland Park Ebell Club | 131 S. Avenue 57 | Los Angeles, CA 90042
Tickets: $20-$800 (Both regular seats and boxes are available, box seats come with a bottle of wine)
Ticket Link: https://www.pacificoperaproject.com/ercole

Cast

Logan Webber* - Ercole
Janet Todd - Ippolita
Meagan Martin - Antiope
Michael Skarke* - Alceste
Kyle Tingzon* - Teseo
Manfred Anaya* - Telemone
Véronique Filloux* - Martesia
Audrey Yoder - Orizia

*Pacific Opera Project debut

Staff

Director/Design - Josh Shaw
Conductor - Kyle Naig
Costumes - Maggie Green

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.

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