Long Beach Opera presents an exploration into the work of visionary composer Pauline Oliveros, featuring the first-ever live staging of her operatic work Bye Bye Butterfly.

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Bye Bye Butterfly

The Los Angeles Theatre Center

The story of a modest flower picker and her high-stakes romance with a local hacienda owner. Co-created by McCall Cadenas and pop chanteuse San Cha, inspired by San Cha’s celebrated 2020 album La Luz de la Esperanza.

Asunción World Premiere

Kate Soper’s seminal “philosophy-opera” (New Yorker) with original choreography by the Martha Graham Dance Company

Ipsa Dixit New Production

Art Theatre of Long Beach

A rare opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look at the creation process with 2023/24 Composer-In-Residence Shelley Washington

The Passion of Nell

Get ready to embark on a musical journey that combines George Frideric Handel's brilliance with Tiffany Townsend's "powerhouse vocal presence," leaving you eager for the full production in the seasons to come.

Alcina Preview

An opera that delves into the depths of identity, challenges perceptions of time, and takes you on a transformative journey of healing. Crafted by the innovative composer Alyssa Weinberg and the visionary poet J. Mae Barizo

Isola World Premiere

Compound

A celebratory dinner party featuring a performance by powerhouse vocalist Measha Brueggergosman-Lee and directed and hosted by James Darrah.

Gala 1979

L'Opera Italian Restaurant

For its second annual LB Opera & Film Festival, LBO presents two full days of events that explore the intersection of film and opera with new live stagings and a robust and unexpected slate of filmic programming centered around historical art song and poetry. Anchoring the expanded festival is a new production and staging of Schubert’s 1823 song cycle Die Schöne Müllerin paired with the 2022 short film Christopher at Sea, which recently premiered at the prestigious Venice International Film Festival. Both are conceived by acclaimed British director, animator, and film festival darling Tom C. J. Brown. The new staging of the song cycle will be performed live in a new production co-directed by Brown and Raviv Ullman. In order to make Christopher at Sea, Brown lived in his film’s setting: on a large cargo vessel at sea and used historic recordings of Schubert’s song cycle as constant inspiration for the queer-focused intimate story, the score and the mood of his animated short. The LB Opera & Film Festival will present an original staged new production of the Schubert cycle followed by a screening of the film, uniquely linking these two works of art in two different mediums crafted 200 years apart.
The festival will also feature the world premiere of THE RECITAL, a new film inspired by Luciano Berio’s wild 1972 work Recital I (for Cathy) with an original screenplay and new score crafted using pieces from the wide-ranging career of powerhouse singer Measha Brueggergosman-Lee. Written and directed by James Darrah, who the Wall Street Journal praised for his operatic film work that is “experimenting and forging a new art form” and premiering a new score composed by Christopher Rountree, THE RECITAL continues Darrah’s commitment to the exploration of operatic cinema at LBO and brings the singular talents of Brueggergosman-Lee to Long Beach in a unique filmic medium.
Additional programming for the full festival will be announced at a later date.

The Recital

The Art Theatre

In its first collaboration with the Martha Graham Dance Company, LBO presents THE FEAST, a dance ritual and baroque banquet that sets Handel’s seldom-staged opera rarity Alessandro in a site-specific outdoor location. Following an hour of cocktails and performances, audiences will be led by the Graham Company to an open-air banquet where they will continue drinking and feasting to live music and dance performances that envelop and disrupt the banquet’s proceedings in surprising ways.
THE FEAST features superstar Polish countertenor Jakub Józef Orlinski, who makes his Southern California staged debut in this evening of Handel’s music presented with early music chamber orchestra accompaniment. Orlinski will sing and even dance with the Martha Graham Dance Company for the first time. The Graham Company will be working to activate a unique location with choreography that pays homage to Graham’s own deep sense of Greek ritual, mythology, and the sacred power of dance and early music to enchant and enthrall.

The Feast

Noguchi Garden

Choreographer and dancer Chris Emile, last seen at LBO creating the innovative choreography for LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES (2021), returns to live performance with an intimate new work that combines Emile’s exceptional movement direction with operatic ritual. Audiences are invited to partake in a meditative and captivating experience driven forward by a raucous, irreverent original score and soundscape by Cody Perkins and astonishing vocals by cross-genre performer Alexis Vaughn.
THE HORSE evokes the supernatural experience of spiritual possession. In Vodun tradition, a “horse” describes a person who has been possessed and is being “ridden” by a possessing deity. In combining somatic practice with theology and research into the origins of ballet, Emile reassesses how traditional balletic training regards the role of the performer/dancer. The resulting work embodies ancestral knowledge, reverence for African religions, and the human-divine connection while reclaiming the relationship between body and spirit as all are invited to witness and experience in this shared catharsis.

The Horse

Rancho Los Cerritos

The singular compositional voice of Kate Soper returns to LBO after Voices from the Killing Jar (2021) in a thrilling new world premiere production that blends an oft-neglected sense of comedy in opera with a genre-smashing adventure story of fantastical proportions. Soper herself sets the piece’s namesake 13th-century poem as a boundary-breaking, evening-length work that defies all categorization. In a thrilling opus that examines one Dreamer’s quest for a literal rose, The God of Love, Shame, Lady Reason and their cadre of followers lull the audience into a dreamlike world that deftly highlights the profound juxtaposition of beauty and absurdity in our own human folly.
Pulitzer Prize finalist Soper fills her newest opera with music that defies tradition and will envelop the theater in new ways with a blend of modernistic shrieks and wails, madrigalistic finery, auto-tuned didacticism, and lush Romanticism. The world premiere production, directed by James Darrah, will inhabit multiple spaces within the historic art deco Warner Grand Theater. Darrah, who is known for creating successful world premiere productions for composers including Ellen Reid, Missy Mazzoli, and John Corigliano, will be joined by conductor and LBO Music Director Christopher Rountree in guiding the orchestra outside of the normal pit and onstage into the show itself. THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE freely beguiles, charms, and terrifies with no moral allegiances or moral compass and promises to lead audiences thrillingly astray.

The Romance of the Rose

Warner Grand Theatre

This new company program celebrates the artists that make LBO unique—giving audiences a close look at artists’ own mediums and personal creative practices in an intimate gallery setting, putting the artists’ work fully ON DISPLAY.
The Long Beach Museum of Art Downtown will be transformed into a two-day exhibition and immersive happening that allows audiences to parse the performances and pieces at will. Artistic Director, James Darrah, has curated current and past LBO artists and invited each to craft performances and unique visual art of their own design. The four artists performing throughout the event have been asked to devise and present a personal piece, show works in progress, and provide insight into their own unique process of creation. Many of the artists performing have worked with LBO in previous projects and this event highlights a side that many LBO patrons don't often see. The two days will vary in content—both will feature a merger of dancers, instrumentalists, and vocalists in shockingly close proximity—ON DISPLAY is an artist-forward expansion of the definition of opera through the creation of new cross-discipline pieces of artists’ own mediums and unique practices.

LBO On Display

LBMA Downtown

Back by popular demand and increasing societal relevance, THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE will return to Long Beach Opera in a brand new production directed by Juilliard-trained actor / director and star of Apple TV’s “The Morning Show” Desean Terry and conucted by Anthony Parnther. The harrowing account of five teenagers wrongfully convicted, incarcerated and eventually exonerated remains a devastatingly relevant indictment on racial injustices in America. LBO’s 2019 world premiere of the opera brought composer and “national treasure” (Opera News) Anthony Davis additional recognition when the score was selected for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Music. “Davis’ supercharged score grippingly conveys the claustrophobia of a racist legal system and society from which there was, for these five innocent boys and their families, no exit.” (Los Angeles Times).

After the critical acclaim of the world premiere and the collective awakening of the Black Lives Matter movement, LBO brings back this important, lauded work in a brand new production, featuring many of the original cast members along with some new additions. Terry’s new production of THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE will reinvigorate the story of five innocent Black teenagers trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare of the American criminal justice system.

The Central Park Five

Jordan High School

Directed by LBO’s Artistic Director and visionary James Darrah, George Frideric Handel’s glorious music and surprisingly relevant drama re-emerges as a site specific, cinematically driven, wildy raucous contemporary party. A story of ill-fated romance, long lost familial relationships and conquerors and their captors, LBO’s GIUSTINO will elevate the ambiguities of gender already present in baroque opera and examine how stereotypes can be shattered even in the most traditional stories. Darrah’s breakthrough stylistic hybrid of cinema-theater recontextualizes the salon-like qualities of Handel’s 18th century work to a transitory, temporal space, further challenging the current norms of 21st century classical music consumption.

The libretto and score will be taken apart and reassembled by Darrah, conductor Christopher Rountree, and exciting young composer Shelley Washington, and will be performed with both authentic baroque specialists as well as contemporary musical and dramatic updates. The action of the scenes will move amongst the audience and to different parts of the location, and will be live-filmed to create a movie within an opera playing at all times. And just as spectators did during the time of Handel, the audience will be encouraged to truly revel in the decadence and transcendence of Handel’s glorious music without the trappings of traditional, staid classical music performances.

Long Beach Opera

20 - 21 Jul, 2024

Bye Bye Butterfly

13 - 21 Jul, 2024

Asunción World Premiere

Long Beach Opera