Lowell House Plans Opera

Opera fans, take note! It's time for the 58th annual Lowell House Opera production, staged by New England's longest running amateur opera company.

After successful runs of La Traviata and La Bohème the past two seasons, the Lowell House Opera company wanted to turn its hand, and voice, to something challenging, yet not widely performed. The company settled on The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht.

"Kurt Weill's iconoclastic work tests the boundaries of what we consider opera," says Steve Huang '95, music director. "With its cheap-sounding music and tawdry story, Mahagonny breaks from the operatic tradition of bel canto arias sung by equally beautiful characters."

A tale of capitalism gone haywire, Mahagonny tells the story of Jimmy McIntyre, a lumberjack from Alaska who tries to find happiness in the oasis town of Mahagonny. But as the city transforms from idyll to a place of sin and excess -- where you can do anything you want as long as you can afford it -- Jimmy's life deteriorates. At first reveling in his newfound freedom, Jimmy amasses debt after debt, a situation that ultimately leads to his arrest and execution.

Pianist Max Levinson, who serves as music tutor at Lowell House, says doing a piece like Mahagonny is perfect for a company based at an academic center: "By producing a neglected and unfamiliar work like Mahagonny, we are holding on to some near-forgotten ideals of favoring artistic merit over commercial considerations, of giving exposure to music that needs to be heard rather than giving in to the temptation of easy box office profits. We are lucky that as an educational institution we can afford to worry first and foremost about scaling the challenges of an important musical and dramatic work and presenting this to a public that might not otherwise have the opportunity to hear it."

As in past years, the opera will feature the talents of up-and-coming performers from the Boston music scene, as well as students from Harvard, Boston University, the New England Conservatory, and the Longy School of Music. Affiliates of the Harvard community include stage director Kirk Williams, PhD '96, and producer Elena DeCoste '98. Emmanuel Mani Cadet will play the role of Jimmy, and Laura Bewig will play the femme fatale Jenny. Both Cadet and Bewig are master's degree candidates in opera at the New England Conservatory of Music.

The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny will open with a black-tie evening on March 6. Tickets are $25 for this performance. Other performances will be held on March 8, 9, 13, 15, 16. Tickets for these performances are $10 for adults and $6 for students. Tickets may be purchased at the Holyoke Center Ticket Office (495-2663), starting Feb. 21, and at the door.

The curtain time is 8:30 p.m. All performances will be held in the Lowell House Dining Hall, 10 Holyoke Place, Cambridge. For more information, call Richard An at 493-0904.