Photo by Mark Frohna
UWM Impossible Operas
'Impossible Operas' development at laboratory at UWM.
You come to their wedding reception with doubts. Bluebeard and Judith met online during the pandemic, rated 98% compatible by their dating app. Do algorithms tell the whole story? Some flotsam of disturbing gossip about Bluebeard remains stuck in the back of your mind, rumors about his past relationships with women. The mood at the reception is vaguely ominous—maybe it’s just the Bela Bartok tunes the pianist is playing. And then Bluebeard points to seven doors and tells Judith she can open them all—except that last one. What’s that all about?
Milwaukee Opera Theatre and Quasimondo Physical Theatre will raise those questions in their new production, Impossible Operas. The setting is Bluebeard and Judith’s reception, you and the rest of the audience are guests. There will be seven singers arrayed at the sides of the room with the focus on those doors, pulled away by fishing lines seven times to reveal an elaborately conceived yet simply staged performance of seven “impossible operas.”
As Milwaukee Opera Theatre’s Artistic Director Jill Anna Ponasik tells it, the Impossible Operas concept was conceived when the production’s co-stage director, Jeffrey Mosser, purchased, in a used bookshop, a handbook to 100 operas whose title pages were missing. It turned out to be Felix Mendelssohn’s The Story of One Hundred Operas, a 1913 work that reduced elaborate librettos to basic points, “those grand concepts distilled into a couple of sentences,” Ponasik says, adding, “Jeff was taken by the weirdness, the fantastical plot elements.”
Photo by Mark Frohna.
Impossible Operas UWM
'Impossible Operas' development at laboratory at UWM.
Impossible Operas came to life when Ponasik and Quasimondo’s Artistic Director Brian Rott co-taught an opera class at UWM last fall. They ran students through elements from seven of the most outlandish, non-naturalistic stories in the operatic repertoire, accompanied by shadow puppetry by Anja Notanja Sieger. By semester’s end, the blueprint for the upcoming production was drawn, with credit shared by Rott, Mosser, Notanja Sieger, Ponasik and musical arranger Tim Rebers.
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“The stories are epic, but we’re performing them with a light bulb and a paper dragon,” Ponasik continues. Within 75 minutes, the guests at Bluebeard and Judith’s reception will be treated to excerpts from Handel’s Alcina, Poulenc’s Les mamelles de Tirésias and Wagner’s Ring Trilogy (“the doors keep blowing open and the rest of it comes out,” Ponasik says) plus 10-minute encapsulations of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges.
In between performances, Bluebeard and Judith (played by Kirk Thomsen and Jessi Miller) comment on the performances. “They are watching it with us and telling us about it,” Ponasik says. “They are talking about the things that are baked into opera as an art form—and about being an artist limping along in a broken world.” Bluebeard has not told Judith about his many ex-wives. “He’s harboring a secret,” Ponasik adds. “There will be a very important reveal!”
Impossible Operas will be performed May 25-28 at the Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre, 158 N. Broadway. For tickets and more information, visit milwaukeeoperatheatre.org or call (414) 291-7800.
