Christopher Caines directs Purcell's "The Fairy Queen"
Company:
Christopher Caines
Christopher Caines directs and choreographs Henry Purcell's The Fairy Queen—opening this weekend!
Artistic director Christopher Caines has spent the summer directing and choreographing a production of his own devising of Henry Purcell's baroque masterwork The Fairy Queen for New York's dell'Arte Opera Ensemble as part of their all-Shakespeare summer festival season.
The opera is a fantastical and playful exploration of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. The setting is now, the summer of 2014, and New York City, expecially Central Park, where the fairy monarchs, Oberon and Titania, maintain the headquarters of their global empire. Theseus is a social media entrepreneur on Wall Street; his fiancée, Hippolyta, a former vice president at Amazon. The lovers are all recent graduates of the Dalton School, while the "rude mechanicals" are twenty-something performing artists with day jobs at Theseus's company, Manhathens, Inc. And, you, the audience, "all more fairies are" . . .
The cast includes 11 singers, 11 actors, 2 dancers, and 9 members of The Sebastians, New York's hottest young baroque band, under the direction of Maestro Joffrey Grossman. Don't miss it—"T'will be a hoot!"
Performances are at the CSC Theater near Union Square, August 8, 9, 10, 16, 18, and 23.
For tickets and all other information: http://www.dellarteopera.org/season.php5?p=58
Says Caines:
"It is a great privilege to have spent these last few weeks in the company of Henry Purcell and the great company of young artists we have assembled to share what I hope will prove to be a very special incarnation of the composer's last masterpiece. I have sought to create a staging as quirky, sexy, playful, and fun as the score itself. I have created a very physical production, with a lot of dancing—including featured numbers for two ballet dancers, but also for the entire cast of singers and actors, incorporating among other styles Elizabethan and baroque influences. The music is glorious. "Come, come, let us leave this town . . ."
