www.operaphila.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u201cThe Black Crown,\u201d co-created by music supervisor and bass-baritone Dav\u00f3ne Tines performing in the title role, fuses vaudeville, gospel, opera, jazz and spirituals to bring Hughes\u2019 verse to life onstage.<\/p>\n
\u201cLangston Hughes\u2019 expansive and penetrating engagement with the life of the other has been a guiding salve since I was first introduced to his work in elementary school,\u201d said Tines. \u201cThis production provides the opportunity to harness Hughes\u2019 words and my life experience as a Black man to claim humanity for myself, my race and all people.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou laugh \/ Because I\u2019m poor and black and funny\u2026\u201d opens the poem and stage production, unraveling into a reflection of the Black experience in America.<\/p>\n
Written in 1931, Hughes\u2019 powerfully dramatic monologue is organized into two columns: the \u201cmood,\u201d which highlights musical and emotional cues, and the \u201cpoem,\u201d the narrative core of the work. Together, these columns express a strong sense of being \u201cBlack in a white world,\u201d with the perspective paralleling Hughes\u2019 personal interpretation and the societal perception projected onto Black individuals.<\/p>\n
With a career that spanned the Harlem Renaissance of the Twenties and the Black Arts movement of the Sixties, Langston Hughes was the most prolific black poet of his era. Between 1926, when he published his pioneering\u202f\u201dThe Weary Blues,\u201d to 1967, the year of his death, when he published\u202f\u201dThe Panther and the Lash,\u201d Hughes would write 16 books of poems, two novels, seven collections of short stories, two autobiographies, five works of nonfiction and nine children\u2019s books.<\/p>\n
Opera Philadelphia will continue the journey of artistic experimentation and discovery with five new productions slated for the 2026-27 season across three Philadelphia venues.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want Opera Philadelphia\u2019s world of opera to feel like your world, no matter who you are,\u201d said Opera Philadelphia General Director and President Anthony Roth Costanzo. \u201cWhether the music is old or new, whether you\u2019re a first-timer or an aficionado, you can come to any (or preferably all) of these five productions and have that uncanny feeling of having lived some part of the story you see on stage in front of you.\u201d<\/p>\n
The season will launch in September with Costanzo on stage alongside some of the great operatic stars of today, celebrated tenor Lawrence Brownlee and radiant soprano Lauren Snouffer, in the company premiere of \u201cMitridate, re di Ponto,\u201d an early career triumph for composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who completed the opera when he was just 14-years-old.<\/p>\n
In her first opera, Courtney Bryan, an Opera Philadelphia Composer in Residence from 2022-24, brings plaintive new life to Tennessee Williams\u2019 \u201cSuddenly Last Summer,\u201d about a family secret and a mother\u2019s desperate attempt to silence the truth.<\/p>\n
In an production ripped from the headlines, February 2027, brings a revival of George and Ira Gershwins\u2019 most overlooked work, \u201cLet \u2018Em Eat Cake,\u201d a biting satire about an American president who refuses to accept a reelection loss and stages a fascist coup and a redesign of the White House.<\/p>\n
Visionary director Zack Winokur leads one of the first productions to be staged since the 1933 Broadway debut of the dystopian American farce, which features one of the Gershwin brothers\u2019 most complex and inventive scores.<\/p>\n
Director Kaneza Schaal leads a lush new production of \u201cAida\u201d in April 2027, marking the first performances of Verdi\u2019s masterpiece at the Academy of Music in more than two decades.<\/p>\n
The season concludes in May 2027, with the world premiere of \u201cSitcom,\u201d an episodic opera by composer Luke Styles and librettist Alan McKendrick that co-opts the television sitcom format for the opera stage. Conceived as multiple 30-minute \u201cepisodes,\u201d the opera takes the characters Max, Bettina, Joan and Vendetta on hugely transformative journeys, but just like on TV, each of them returns to their status quo for the beginning of the next episode.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe extraordinary artists who come to play in our sandbox are cooking up a feast of beauty, and we are excited to serve it to you on a silver platter for less than the cost of a cheesesteak,\u201d Costanzo said. \u201cThrough interdisciplinary collaborations, new perspectives, and a love of the craft, this company is here to show you that opera is as much a part of our future as it is a part of our past.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Opera Philadelphia is about to conclude this season with an interesting take on some of the most famous…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":186282,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[858,69,71,70,1483,289,10918],"class_list":["post-186281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-ontap","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-theater","tag-things-to-do","tag-top-stories-tth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186281\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}