2012-2013 Opera Season | School of Music

The Ohio State University Opera announces its 2012-2013 season, showcasing a wide breadth of the Lyric Theatre repertoire.

This fall, the OSU Opera joins forces with the Ohio State University Departments of Theatre and Dance to present the full-scale musical whodunit The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Rupert Holmes. Based on the unfinished novel by Charles Dickens, this bawdy but good-natured tongue-in-cheek work will be both directed and conducted by the OSU School of Music’s Director of Opera, A. Scott Parry, and will be choreographed by Susan Hadley of the OSU Department of Dance. Graduate designers from the OSU Department of Theatre will take on set, costume, and lighting responsibilities.

Said Parry, “Drood is a frothy farcical romp, and it’s the only show I know of that asks the audience to vote on how they want it to end. Who will be the guilty Murderer? Who will sing the Lover’s Duet? Who will play the Private Detective who solves the Mystery? No one knows, not even me, until the audience has its say each and every night.” This OSU collaborative production coincides with the first Broadway rival of Drood that opens this fall in New York, having not been seen there since its Tony Award-winning premiere run in 1986.

From a light-hearted Victorian Era musical we are transported to the other end of the theatrical spectrum by the perennially tragic tale of Carmen. Next spring, the OSU Opera presents a newly adapted version of this Bizet masterpiece in an intimate, yet highly charged chamber version. The production will again be helmed by director Parry who re-imagines the ever-popular work as an expression of an unraveling mind, its familiar characters becoming merely echoes, asking what is real, what is imagined, what is memory, and what is dream?

Traditionally presented as a four-act grand opera, the OSU Opera’s Carmen is reconceived as a one act opéra comique with spoken dialogue interspersed throughout. The production will explore the power of truths that are hidden and/or revealed by the interplay of shadow and light, sound and silence. The immediacy and directness of this unconventional presentation is sure to provide a unique experience that’s not to be missed.