5 Companies You Need to Know: Indie Opera in NYC

Where to see new works and reinvented classics, often in English!

With New York City Opera essentially dormant, you might think The Metropolitan Opera is the only diva in town. Despite its much reported on financial struggles, the Lincoln Center icon dominates brand recognition with its 3,800 seats beneath gold starburst chandeliers, plus an approximate $330 million annual budget.

But just as there’s more to theatre than Broadway, there are many smaller NYC opera companies hitting high notes all year-round. In fact, this month four of the five troupes we’re highlighting have performances, including two New York premieres.

If you think opera is an intimidating realm where the performances are long, expensive and in German, that’s not always the case. (As an occasional opera librettist who’s developed and presented works with some of these organizations, I can attest to this.) Meet five alternatives to The Met and consider treating yourself to a night at the opera—no tux required.

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1. Heartbeat Opera

The folks who run Heartbeat Opera are the antithesis of snobby purists. Jacob Ashworth, Christian De Gré Cárdenas and Dan Schlosberg conjure “radical adaptations” of classic titles for modern audiences. Typically, music director Schlosberg trims the score for shorter attention spans (around 100 minutes), performers sing in English and directors create updated, intimate stagings. Since its founding in 2014, Heartbeat has presented dozens of innovative reimaginings of well-known operas, including a Fidelio centering on a wrongly convicted Black Lives Matter activist and a Manon infused with the razzmatazz of Broadway musicals.

What’s next? Now through May 31 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, Heartbeat presents Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Vanessa, a gothic psychodrama about a woman terrified of aging awaiting a lover from her past. Performed in English, Vanessa was a smash at last summer’s Williamstown Theatre Festival.

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2. American Opera Projects (AOP)

AOP helps incubate new American operas through its Composers & the Voice program, a boot camp for budding librettists and composers. When not training the next generation of domestic opera makers, AOP mounts productions. Since 1988, the company has expanded the canon of American opera with noteworthy premieres including Stephen Schwartz’s Séance on a Wet Afternoon, A Thousand Splendid Suns based on Khaled Hosseini’s novel and the frequently performed As One, about a transwoman’s coming of age.

What’s next? From May 16 to 21, AOP presents the New York premiere of The Post Office at BAM. Featuring a score by As One composer Laura Kaminsky and a libretto by poet Elaine Sexton, this civic allegory centers on a contested marriage license for two men as postal workers let their religious beliefs get in the way of municipal duties. Expect the ghost of Benjamin Franklin, the first US Postmaster General, to sing an aria!
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3. Experiments in Opera (EiO)

Yes, opera can be hilarious—I’m not joking! Besides the centuries-old tradition of opera buffa, there’s funny business everywhere. In fact, Experiments in Opera has made it more or less the house style. Founded in 2010, this iconoclastic outfit develops new operas like TV writers’ rooms by gathering a group of librettists and composers, pairing them off and commissioning them to create works around a theme. Run by artists—composers Aaron Siegel, Jason Cady and Kamala Sankaram, and stage director Shannon Sindelar—the keywords for EiO are intimate and fun. You see the singers up close; they, in turn, get to see you laugh.

What’s next? The madness of EiO’s method is on view at HERE through May 22 with Constance: A Confession, about a charming sociopath who swindles her way from petty crime to head of a cult. Four up-and-coming singers perform with the experimental ensemble Hypercube.
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4. Bronx Opera (BxO)

The OG on this list, Bronx Opera is “the only non-Lincoln Center opera company in NYC to have produced each year since our founding in 1967,” as its website says. BxO is a family affair: founder and artistic director Michael Spierman runs it with his son Benjamin, the general director. And locals can audition to fill out the choruses that grand warhorses require. In addition to bringing opera to schools and community organizations in its home borough, BxO is committed to access for all, offering $40 tickets for its handsomely designed, English-language productions at Lehman College’s Lovinger Theatre.

What’s next? The company just wrapped its season with a run of Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos. Sign up for BxO’s email list to learn about future productions—the troupe typically produces two operas annually.

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5. Prototype

No producer has worked harder to change the image of American opera than Beth Morrison and her Prototype festival. Every January since 2013, Prototype offers a sampler of daring experiments and hybrids that stretch the boundaries of opera and music-theatre in venues across the city. Performers usually wear body mics (verboten in traditional houses); the music is not reheated Romanticism but often thorny or electronic; the subject matter may unsettle or bewilder. Past Prototype productions included a piece about a mystic lesbian nun; a posthumous NYC premiere for avant-garde wizard Richard Foreman; and a stark, minimalist fable based on the story that inspired Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Bravo! Opera is supposed to be shocking, not sleepy.

What’s next? The lineup for Prototype 2027 will be announced this fall. In the meantime, get a taste of what it has to offer at Morrison’s emerging-artist hothouse BMP:NEXTGEN, May 16 and 17 at National Sawdust in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

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