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3Union Avenue Opera returned following the 2020 pandemic with an abbreviated schedule of two delightful outdoor productions performed in four days at The Big Top. Given the continuing pandemic situation, Union Avenue Opera devised a clever and ultimately successful method for delivering its 2021 season after being forced to cancel the 2020 summer season. Its artistic director Scott Schoonover and administrative director Emily Stolarski made the temporary move to The Big Top, where the sides were opened to allow breezes to blow into the seating area.
Isabelle Eberhardt, the real-life protagonist of composer Missy Mazzoli's and librettist Royce Vavrek's chamber opera "Song from the Uproar," was at least a century ahead of her time. During her brief life, the Swiss author struck a blow for female independence that her contemporaries regarded as subversive but that feels very much relevant in today's society. Though not without problems, Mazzoli's first opera (2012) remains a striking piece of contemporary music theater, and one must be grateful to Chicago Fringe Opera for presenting the local premiere, in an absorbing production playing at the Preston Bradley Center in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood.
Chicago is currently awash in debut operas by major young composers staged by upstart companies. Third Eye Theatre Ensemble is presenting Nico Muhly’s Dark Sisters, which runs through November 6. And Friday night Chicago Fringe Opera gave the Chicago premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s Song from the Uproar at the Preston Bradley Center. Fringe Opera scoring a striking success with their performances of Philip Glass’s In the Penal Colony last spring. Compared to the claustrophobic gallery for that show, the wide fourth-floor space at the Uptown venue must have seemed like the Met. Premiered in 2012 in New York, Song from the Uproar tells of Isabelle Eberhardt, a Swiss journalist and explorer who lived from 1877-1904. Her short but packed life hits a Lotto Powerball of zeitgeist-friendly themes: a feminist pioneer and anti-colonial activist; a convert to Islam; and a woman who cross-dresses to pass as a man in Algeria. Add her debut published story written at 18 about necrophilia and her death in a flash flood at age 27, and the material was clearly impossible to resist for composer Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek.
