Latest news with #DanSchlosberg
New York Times
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Counterfeit Opera' Comes Together Like a Madcap Caper
'The Counterfeit Opera: A Beggar's Opera for a Grifter City,' which opens the summer season at Little Island on Friday, wears its influences on its sleeve. It draws not only from John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch's 'The Beggar's Opera,' which is often credited as birthing the modern musical in 1728, but also that show's 1928 adaptation, 'The Threepenny Opera,' by Bertolt Brecht, Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill. Indeed, many of the characters' names — including the scoundrel Macheath and his paramours Polly and Lucy — are the same in all three works. But 'The Counterfeit Opera' is also a 'fake opera,' according to Kate Tarker, who wrote the book and lyrics. The story is still rooted in underworld figures. Now, though, they are a gang of modern-day burglars who use their plundered loot from places including the Metropolitan Opera, to put on a show. 'These thieves are calling it an opera,' the show's director, Dustin Wills, said with a laugh. 'They probably don't go to the opera very often.' 'The Counterfeit Opera' has had a fast and furious gestation; Wills said it has been like ''Project Runway' for directing.' It started late last fall, when Zack Winokur, Little Island's producing artistic director, approached Wills and the composer-arranger Dan Schlosberg, the music director of Heartbeat Opera. Wills and Schlosberg had teamed up on last summer's Little Island production of 'The Marriage of Figaro,' in which the opera star Anthony Roth Costanzo sang all the parts, and Winokur asked if they would be interested in taking on 'The Beggar's Opera.' But instead of a revival, they pitched a new show, and brought in Tarker. (She and they had worked on her play 'Montag,' at Soho Rep, in 2022). In January, she started writing the libretto and lyrics, and the trio essentially devised a new musical in six months. 'We had a really madcap development process,' Tarker said after a recent rehearsal. 'Why am I speaking in the past tense? We are still locked into a particular madness that we have foisted upon ourselves.' The show that the thieves put on in 'The Counterfeit Opera' is set in 1855, in the Manhattan neighborhood of Five Points (where the Martin Scorsese film 'Gangs of New York' takes place). 'It was kind of a golden age of counterfeiting in the U.S., before we had a standardized bank note,' Tarker said. 'The line between legitimacy and criminal behavior was very thin, which is a moment that we're in again,' she added. 'It really felt like we can use this to talk about today.' Both 'The Beggar's Opera' and 'Threepenny' have a satirical tone that is essential — and very much a part of the new piece as well, though the humor and slapstick evident at the rehearsal suggested a homegrown influence, the Marx Brothers film 'A Night at the Opera' (1935). In general, the 'Counterfeit' creators have been upping the ante with more shenanigans and more pushing of the envelope. In 'The Beggar's Opera,' for example, Lucy tries to poison Polly. That was taken out in 'Threepenny,' and now Tarker has chosen yet another route. 'We're not doing one poisoning, we're not doing zero poisonings — we're doing double poisoning,' she said. 'And we're going to take this scene as far as it can go.' Tarker said that some of her lyrics were inspired by indie rock and pop. She was thinking of the Brandy and Monica hit 'The Boy Is Mine,' for example, when writing the 'jealousy duet' between Polly and Lucy. For his part, Schlosberg mentioned Nino Rota, Americana, Angelo Badalamenti and 'Weill, specifically in the accompaniment of one of the songs.' Weill, though, is also 'kind of infused' in the score, Schlosberg said, 'because I love certain aspects of that music: dryness, brutality, just kind of in your face, unadorned.' The show's sound has also been shaped by the cast members, most of whom come from musical theater, including Damon Daunno ('Oklahoma!') as Macheath and Lauren Patten ('Jagged Little Pill') as Jenny. Schlosberg was intrigued by the countertenor range of Daunno, who grew up admiring jazz singers like Ella Fitzgerald and would adopt a higher register when singing along with them. 'I used to call it my fake voice,' Daunno said in a phone interview. 'I used to be sort of afraid to use it and think I was doing something wrong or cheap, or fake.' He started relaxing into his upper register when he created the role of Orpheus in the Off Broadway production of the musical 'Hadestown' in 2016, and recently he has been studying with Katharina Rössner, an instructor at Mozarteum University Salzburg in Austria. 'It's been a real opera-centric moment in my life,' Daunno said. 'It felt like the perfect sort of preparation, like training camp to do right before stepping into this show.' Once Schlosberg discovered Daunno's interest in testing his own boundaries, he ran with it. 'He can sing all the way up to a high G sharp, A — that's sopranos,' Schlosberg said. 'In his love duet with Polly, I made a point to keep him in his baritone, then we start hearing them together and he sings above her and then goes back. So there's a lot of sleight-of-voice that I'm interested in. 'I'm trying to always keep myself and listeners and actors on their toes,' Schlosberg added. 'The first song that Polly sings transitions on a dime from rock to opera, to Björk, to oddball comedy.' Like the thieves piecing together a show from motley pieces of scenery and fabric, the team behind 'The Counterfeit Opera' is mixing and matching in a hurry, as if they, too, were in the middle of a caper. 'It's very fitting with the nature of this piece that it is thrown together and that they're still rewriting, and we still haven't teched and it's going to rain again next week, and who the hell knows?' Daunno said. 'But guess what? We're all in it together.'
Wall Street Journal
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Faust' Review: Heartbeat Opera Deals With Gounod's Devil
New York Heartbeat Opera's radical adaptations of classic titles can soar or fall flat, but one constant has always been music director Dan Schlosberg, whose ingenious maverick arrangements—such as February's 'Salome' for eight clarinetists and two percussionists—never fail to stimulate. Until now.
South China Morning Post
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Why upstart US opera company's stripped-down productions have found an audience
Dan Schlosberg remembers the day 11 years ago when his upstart opera company put on its first performance – in a yoga studio before an audience of 30 people. Advertisement 'We did Kurt Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins accompanied by an upright piano that we got for free on Craigslist and a violin,' said Schlosberg, Heartbeat Opera's musical director and one of its founders. Its name came 'from the idea that singers would be feet away from you', Schlosberg said. 'And so you would be experiencing their voices at arm's length and that would make a resonance in your heart.' Today, when many opera companies are struggling financially, Heartbeat appears to be thriving, with an annual budget that just passed US$1 million. But true to its initial vision, the company still performs in small venues, most with a seating capacity of about 200. Advertisement 'Very few small companies take up the ambition to do the fullness of opera on a small scale,' said Jacob Ashworth, another founding member and Heartbeat's artistic director. 'We don't do small opera. We do big opera in a small space.'
08-05-2025
- Business
Scrappy opera company Heartbeat thrives by reimagining the classics
NEW YORK -- Dan Schlosberg remembers the day 11 years ago when his upstart opera company put on its first performance — in a yoga studio before an audience of 30 people. 'We did Kurt Weill's 'The Seven Deadly Sins' accompanied by an upright piano that we got for free on Craigslist and a violin,' recalled Schlosberg, the company's music director and one of its founders. They named their company Heartbeat Opera, 'from the idea that singers would be feet away from you,' Schlosberg said. 'And so you would be experiencing their voices at arm's length and that would make a resonance in your heart.' Today, in an era when many opera companies are struggling financially, Heartbeat appears to be thriving, with an annual budget that just passed $1 million. But true to its initial vision, the company still performs in small venues, most with a seating capacity of about 200. 'Very few small companies take up the ambition to do the fullness of opera on a small scale,' said Jacob Ashworth, another founding member and Heartbeat's artistic director. 'We don't do small opera. We do big opera in a small space.' And despite its success with critics and audiences — performances regularly sell out — the company has deliberately maintained a modest schedule. There's typically an opera-themed drag show around Halloween and then two operas staged in New York City performance spaces in the winter and spring. Each work is condensed to 90-100 intermission-less minutes with new orchestrations that require just a few musicians. Marc Scorca, president and CEO of Opera America, thinks Heartbeat is smart not to expand too quickly — a mistake that has caused some small companies to collapse. 'Growth itself shouldn't be a goal. Excellence should be a goal,' he said. 'I always prefer companies to plan their trajectory as slow as possible so they don't overstretch and overstep.' Unlike some small companies, Heartbeat doesn't focus on new work or on bringing to light neglected old rarities. Instead, its website promises 'incisive adaptations and revelatory arrangements of classics, reimagining them for the here and now.' It's that reimagining that attracted Sara Holdren, a director, writer and teacher who first worked with the company on Bizet's 'Carmen' in 2017. 'Their approaches to the storytelling feel extremely of our world and about our world,' she said, 'without falling across that line into a sort of trite topicality where you say, 'Oh yes, I understand a relevant-with-a-capital-R political point is being made here'.' For Beethoven's 'Fidelio,' Heartbeat went to prisons and recorded the voices of incarcerated people, who appeared on video singing the Prisoners Chorus. For Tchaikovsky's 'Eugene Onegin,' the two main male characters became lovers, reflecting the composer's own sexuality. And for Richard Strauss' 'Salome' this season, the teenage title character was dressed in a frilly pink skirt and sneakers; John the Baptist was imprisoned on stage in a cage with transparent sides instead of in an underground cistern; and during the Dance of the Seven Veils, it was a lascivious Herod who stripped off his clothes, not Salome. Heartbeat's casting for 'Salome' reflected the premium it places on theatrical values in addition to vocal ability. Baritone Nathaniel Sullivan, who portrayed John the Baptist, recalled that 'a big part of the audition was just straight acting. And in the rehearsals, there was a real focus on the storytelling. 'I haven't experienced that in a lot of other opera companies to that extent,' he said. Soprano Summer Hassan, who was cast as Salome, admits she was nervous at first 'because I had never done a role like this where I am the title character. 'I was really doubting myself, thinking how do I make this girl look so young?' she said. 'And they said, your physicality will do that on your own. Make her look confident and you will make her look like a confident child. They gave me the tools to figure out it was within me.' Perhaps the most striking aspect of this 'Salome' was the re-orchestration by Schlosberg. Instead of more than 100 players as called for in the original, he took a cue from the opening notes on a clarinet and scored the piece for eight clarinetists (who also played other instruments) and two percussionists. Heartbeat's final local offering of the season will be Gounod's 'Faust,' to run at the Baruch Performing Arts Center from May 13-25. 'I had mentioned to Jacob that I really love devil stories,' said Holdren, who is directing the production. 'And I was fascinated with the idea of taking something so big and so weighed down with history and assumptions and seeing how much we could crack it open and blow the dust off.' She sees Mephistopheles less as a 'mustache-twirling villain' and more as 'a figure of hunger and loneliness slipping into the vacuums that human beings create when they are so desperate or disgusted with life that there's an opening for him.' Her production will be set in contemporary times, sung in French but with new English-language dialogue, and it will make heavy use of shadow puppetry. It's the first Heartbeat offering for which Schlosberg has not done the re-orchestration. That task fell to Francisco Ladrón de Guevara, a Mexican violinist and composer who has scored the opera for seven musicians, most of whom play two instruments, including Ashworth, who will play violin and mandolin and also conduct. Schlosberg will be back doing the arranging for a rare Heartbeat foray outside the city this summer. The company has been invited to stage a revised version of Samuel Barber's 'Vanessa' at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts. 'I'm really excited by what they've been doing, particularly in reimagining the classics for contemporary times," said Raphael Picciarelli, co-managing director of the festival. For Heartbeat's debut in Williamstown, the festival is setting up a new performance space that should make the company feel right at home. It's in an abandoned grocery store, and there will be seats for just over 200 people.
Washington Post
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Scrappy opera company Heartbeat thrives by reimagining the classics
NEW YORK — Dan Schlosberg remembers the day 11 years ago when his upstart opera company put on its first performance — in a yoga studio before an audience of 30 people. 'We did Kurt Weill's 'The Seven Deadly Sins' accompanied by an upright piano that we got for free on Craigslist and a violin,' recalled Schlosberg, the company's music director and one of its founders.
