Director

In this opera, the chorus has the starring role. Composer Gregory Spears, whose music has been called “astonishingly beautiful” (The New York Times), “coolly entrancing” (The New Yorker), and “some of the most beautifully unsettling music to appear in recent memory” (The Boston Globe), creates a labyrinthine soundscape to accompany a dream-like rendering of the fairytale “Sleeping Beauty,” inspired by modernist writer Robert Walser.

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Sleepers Awake

Academy of Music

Composer Gregory Spears, whose music has been called “astonishingly beautiful” (The New York Times), “coolly entrancing” (The New Yorker), and “some of the most beautifully unsettling music to appear in recent memory” (The Boston Globe), creates a labyrinthine soundscape to accompany a dream-like rendering of the fairytale “Sleeping Beauty,” inspired by modernist writer Robert Walser. As the work’s chorus sings itself in and out of slumber, the voices pull us into a liminal space where time is both fractured and cyclical. Conceived with and directed by Jenny Koons, this new work activates a collective voice to question the fragile line between waking and dreaming.

OFNW: Sleepers Awake

Cincinnati Music Hall

Arson. Affairs. Incest. Murder… are only the beginning of problems for the Whistler siblings. Mora’s gotta find her birth mother, Neel’s gotta find himself, and Illy’s gotta keep her piece of the sky… but the birds have other plans. Julia Izumi’s Regretfully, So the Birds Are is a wild, farcical tragedy that gleefully flips the human quest for self-discovery on its head.

Regretfully, So the Birds Are

WP Theater

In this visually rich and innovative reimagining of Sophocles’ classic play, Oedipus  unfolds as a murder mystery, a political thriller, and a psychological whodunit. 

Director

Jenny Koons

Events

Past events

22 - 26 Apr, 2026

Sleepers Awake · Opera Philadelphia

Nov 8, 2025

OFNW: Sleepers Awake · Cincinnati Opera

About

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