The Opera Group | Productions

AMERICAN OPERA

25 May - 7 August 2004

Mahagonny Sonspiel
music by Kurt Weill
words by Bertolt Brecht

Trouble in Tahiti
by Leonard Bernstein

Walking Not Driving
by Tim Coker

Opera, cabaret and jazz are combined by two of the greatest popular song writers to create music theatre exploring suburban dreams and urban realities.

Inspired by American musical comedy and jazz, Trouble in Tahiti is a satire on 1950s ‘comfortable’ suburbia. Leonard Bernstein, the composer of West Side Story and Candide ingeniously grafts classical vocal styles to popular American song forms and darts elusively between comic bravura and deep sadness.

America was also the catalyst for Brecht and Weill‘s Mahagonny Songspiel, which captures the desperation of the city in famous songs such as O Moon of Alabama. God consigns the decadent citizens of an imaginary city to hell, but they reply that they are there already.

Alongside these two classics is a brand new miniature from Tim Coker which brilliantly explores the fantasies of 2004 city dwellers!

25 May
Poole Lighthouse

27 May
Salisbury Playhouse

2 June
Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield

11 July
Wycombe Swan

13 & 21 July
Buxton Festival

14 July
The Garrick, Lichfield

7 August
West Green House, Hartley Whitney