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| Fireworks! | |
| What
makes us Americans? Fun for the entire family |
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| Creative Team | |
| Story and Libretto | Billy Aronson |
| Composer | Kitty Brazelton |
| Origin and Direction | Grethe Barrett Holby |
| Commissioner | Family Opera Initiative, American Opera Projects |
| Fireworks! Synopsis | ||
| Fireworks! is an hilarious "opera-musical" about a benevolent alien who travels to Earth to find out why we shoot colored lights into the sky at the same time each year. As she tries to unravel the mystery, the alien encounters a series of typical Americans who've come to watch the fireworks: a geeky high school student, a rebellious teenage girl, her single working mom, a pompous actor who's preparing for the July 4th play, and the groundskeeper, who wishes people would take more pride in their park. The alien has studied zillions of galaxies, but she's never seen anything as brash, daring, and infectious as this idea of democracy. She can't wait to spread the word…and watch it catch on across the universe! | ||
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Premiere: Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, NY, July 2002; American Opera Projects
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| Artistic Directors Statement | ||
| I commissioned FIREWORKS
in 1997 after having taken my children to a Memorial Day service and realizing
that they knew none of the traditional American songs we were singing. In
fact, they were clueless to the tribute and salutes to our country - clueless
to the idea that these people in front of them had fought wars to protect
what my children assumed was normal life. I wanted to make an opera that
could be performed on our national holidays; an opera in which the community
could participate with minimal rehearsal; an opera that could be performed
in parks across the country on the 4th of July; an opera that would reach
out to audiences who would not usually experience the art form; and an opera
that upheld the benchmark, but broke all expectations, of traditional opera.
To this task, I entrusted two classically trained iconoclasts I had recently
collaborated with separately on two different projects: Billy Aronson and
Kitty Brazelton.
Now we are all questioning
the values of our society, thinking about who we are and what we stand
for. FIREWORKS can be part of this process, while doing what opera
and live theater do best - touching the deepest part of the human heart. |
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- Grethe Barrett
Holby
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| The intergalactic Traveler decends. (rendering by designer Kelly Hanson) | ||
| Fireworks! Artists Bios |
| Kitty Brazelton
(Composer), founder
of the digital-chamber-punk band WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT? is a composer
(D.M.A. Columbia University1994), Bennington College professor, improviser,
rock-mezzo and multi-instrumentalist interested in infusing vernacular American
dialects into deep, complex and passionate structures. John Zorn calls her
"a mover and a shaker in the downtown scene; a singer, bandleader and
composer of striking originality," while the New York Times
calls her "one of the brighter lights of the downtown scene."
She leads exploded rock bands (her second CD with the nonet DADADAH, Love
Not Love Lust Not Lust, was hailed by Rolling Stone magazine as an
"album of impressive nerve"). Making music with computer also
led to her "sizzling contribution" (Village Voice) to Hildegurls'
Electric Ordo Virtutum at Lincoln Center Festival '98, directed by Grethe
Barrett Holby, with whom she is currently collaborating on the opera-musical,
Animal Tales, libretto by George Plimpton. Brazelton's chamber music can
be heard on CD in innovative works for the Manhattan Brass Quintet and the
California EAR Unit (CRI Emergency/New World) to which Gramophone
responded "few composers are as uninhibited in saying exactly what
they want to say," and WIRE Magazine said "There are few musical
styles and genres that she hasn't absorbed or embraced… You might wonder
how someone's musical appetite can be quite so voracious, but the results
are anarchic, wacky and hard to resist." Throughout all, she champions
a return to the universal nature of music.
Billy Aronson
(Story & Lyrics)
has written plays produced by Playwrights Horizons, Ensemble Studio Theatre,
Woolly Mammoth Theatre, and Wellfleet Harbor Actor's Theatre, published
in Best American Short Plays 1992-1993, Best American Short Plays 1999-2000,
and Plays from the Woolly Mammoth, and awarded a New York Foundation
for the Arts grant. His writing for the musical theater includes the original
concept and additional lyrics for the Broadway hit musical Rent, the story
and libretto for Family Opera Initiative's Flurry Tale, composed
by Rusty Magee, origin and direction by Grethe Barrett Holby (orchestra
premiere Lincoln Center's Clark Studio Theater 1999), story and libretto
for FOI's Fireworks, and the book for Sleeping Beauty, a
new musical he is writing with singer/songwriter Patty Larkin. His TV
writing includes scripts for MTV (Beavis & Butt-head), the
Cartoon Network (Courage and the Cowardly Dog and Codename: Kids Next
Door), Children's Television Workshop (Sesame English and the Sesame
Street home video Bert and Ernie's Word Play), the Disney Channel
(Out of the Box), PBS (Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego,
Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego, Reading Rainbow, and the new Arthur
spin-off Postcards from Buster), Nickelodeon (Don't Just Sit
There), A&E International (Biography), The History Channel
(Year by Year for Kids), and Comedy Central (Short Attention
Span Theater). Aronson is a graduate of the Yale Drama School and
Princeton University, and a member of Ensemble Studio Theatre and the
Dramatists Guild. |
| Scrapbook | |||
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| Aronson & Brazelton at an early reading | |||