Photo by Brooke Hall
Have you ever thought to yourself, Gee, I really wish I could stage a show in which huge puppets interact with a trio of opera singers singing a non-opera in a made-up language about a fallen French bank trader? We know we have. The problem is, we quickly realize that we lack literally all of the resources: we don’t run an opera company, we’re not puppet builders–we don’t even know what a non-opera is. Luckily, Rhymes With Opera, a Baltimore-based non-profit whose upcoming production of David Smooke’s Criminal Element will be staged on July 13th at Area 405, is here to help.
Three of Rhymes With Opera’s founding members, singers Elisabeth Halliday, Bonnie Lander, and Robert Maril, will be joined onstage by Baltimore-based chamber group SONAR and a trio of ten-foot-tall puppets built for the show by local artist Valeska Populoh. “Criminal Element is a forty-minute non-opera inspired by the story of outlaw French bank trader Jérôme Kerviel,” says RWO Co-Artistic Director George Lam, “[and] centers on a rogue trader as she becomes increasingly involved in bank fraud and creates fantastical accounts of her life, alternating between flashbacks to her childhood and the present day.”
The company is in the middle of an IndieGogo Crowdsourcing Campaign to help fund this ambitious night of contemporary opera, theater, and puppetry. They’re currently just over 50% of the way to their fundraising goal, so click through.
Gargantuan non-opera puppets don’t pay for themselves, people.
