Opera Program’s Latest is a Haunting Tale
November 15, 2013 at 2:02 pm Tina Hay Leave a comment
The students in Penn State’s Opera Theatre program are staging a production of the tragedy Dialogues of the Carmelites tonight and tomorrow at University Park—and, if last night’s dress rehearsal is any indication, it’ll give you chills.
It’s a 1957 work by a French composer, Francis Poulenc, and is set in the bloody French Revolution of the late 1700s. Blanche, the central character, is an anxious, fearful young woman who becomes a Carmelite nun in hopes of feeling safer in life—and ends up being anything but. As Ted Christopher, the head of the opera theatre program, described it to me last night: “Blanche felt the world closing in on her, so she joined a convent … where she found the world closing in on her even more.”
Blanche’s character is fictional, but the larger story, the martyrdom of 16 Carmelite nuns in 1794, is not.
It’s a dark, intense, provocative production, and the final scene—the nuns singing as, one by one, they head off to their deaths—is incredibly moving.
Performances are at 8 p.m. tonight and tomorrow (Nov. 15 and 16) in the Esber Recital Hall, part of Music Building I. Tickets are $4.99 for the general public; students pay $2. More information is here, and some photos I took at last night’s dress rehearsal are below.
Tina Hay, editor
Entry filed under: Students, University Park. Tags: Carlos Feliciano, Dialogues of the Carmelites, Francis Poulenc, French Revolution, Jennifer Trost, Julia Wolcott, Lisa Rogali, Ryan Ordnung, Ted Christopher.
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed