Porgy and Bess

L Y R I C O P E R A O F C H I C A G O

DANREST

DANREST

Lyric inaugurated its Musical Theater Initiative in 2012-13 with Oklahoma! Pictured are Ashley Brown as Laurey and John Cudia as Curly; and Curtis Holbrook as Will with dancers Teanna Zarro (left) and Christine Smith (right)

audience was our traditional operagoers as I am that we attracted so many people who were new to Lyric.” Ultimately, Lyric’s work with musical theater will always be a work in progress. “Inevitably, each year, we have to take stock,” says Freud. “If an experiment is not working, you don’t maintain it. So far, it’s working – and each year we’ll try to do better than the previous year.” Looking ahead to Carousel With two popular and successful productions completed, the American Musical Theater Initiative now turns to Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel for its third offering, opening in April 2015. In many ways, Carousel is an outlier in the Rodgers and Hammerstein canon. At its 1945 Broadway premiere it proved an immediate hit with critics and audiences, and Time magazine named it the best musical of all time in 1999. It boasts some incredibly famous songs, including the beautiful “If I Loved You” and the anthemic “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” At the same time, Carousel is often called the most operatic of all Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, and Anthony Freud deems it “the most sophisticated, the most ambiguous, the least straightforward” of all their works. “The characters are complex, the sympathies of the audience change constantly through the piece, and the conclusion asks as

of Lyric’s initiative have generated incredible excitement and record-setting audiences. More than 36,000 people saw Oklahoma! and half of that audience had never been to a Lyric performance before. Attendance achieved even greater heights for The Sound of Music , currently the best-selling production in the company’s history with almost 72,000 tickets sold and 58% of the audience new to Lyric. As Renée Fleming summarizes, “The overwhelming, positive response to these productions is proof that our audiences embrace the idea, and that they enjoy seeing the impressive resources of a great opera company like Lyric give new life to these shows we all love so much.” It is still too early to know whether the new audiences who came to see The Sound of Music and Oklahoma! will come back to hear Tosca or Tannhäuser . Still, Lyric has already seen success in encouraging its opera audience to hear the musicals and other new projects, such as the mariachi opera Cruzar la Cara de la Luna (2013) – about half of that production’s audience was new to Lyric. “The purpose of the American Musical Theater Initiative is to both bring in new audiences, and to provide exciting, entertaining, thought-provoking experiences for our existing opera audiences,” says Freud. “I’m just as enthusiastic about the fact that half of the

pieces and new works is absolutely at the heart of Lyric’s mission.” The American Musical Theatre Initiative gives Chicago audiences the opportunity to see the classic works of Broadway done on a scale that simply cannot be found anywhere else. As Freud notes, “At Lyric, we can perform musicals with a wonderful orchestra and an operatic chorus. These pieces do have a grand scenic scale, and in our very large opera house, we’re able to present musicals in a way that is impossible commercially.” Audiences at The Sound of Music experienced the depth of Lyric’s resources when soprano Christine Brewer (as the Mother Abbess) led the choir of nuns in “Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” or when the von Trapp mansion was seen onstage in all of its exquisite period detail. In Oklahoma!, the expansive set gave plenty of room for the performers to move, whether in the exuberant square dance or the dramatic dream ballet. The music of every production has been anchored by the marvelous Lyric Opera Orchestra, an ensemble whose size is unprecedented for most contemporary Broadway musicals. Essentially, Lyric’s productions are an experience that can’t be replicated, and Freud’s hope is that “we’re recapturing the excitement these great works generated when they were new.” The two musicals presented to date as part

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