Operetta "Die Fledermaus" Coming to JSU March 3rd

Comic Operetta comes to Jacksonville
in Seven Hills Opera’s Concert of Die Fledermaus

Rome, GA’s, newest arts creation, the Seven Hills Opera Theatre, will present its second season offering in a concert performance March 3 in the Performance Center of Mason Hall on the Campus of Jacksonville State University. The community opera company will perform Johann Strauss’s comic masterpiece Die Fledermaus, with the concert beginning at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $10 for adults and $6 for students; they may be purchased by calling 782-5876 at the door. 

Composed in 1874, non-stop in forty-two “nights of veritable rapture,” this is the younger Strauss's most celebrated and popular operetta—intoxicatingly melodious and exuberant. Mistaken identities, flirtations at a masked ball, elegant frivolities and confusions of all kinds provide a hilarious vehicle for some of the most captivating music ever written. Seven Hills Opera Theatre’s production will be a semi-staged, multi-media concert version accompanied by piano.

Die Fledermaus was originally set in an elegant and contemporary 1874 Vienna; the Seven Hills Opera production is updating the operetta to reflect a 1920s setting in Chicago during Prohibition. The production is in English, and new dialogue has been written to take the place of the original German and to accommodate the American setting, according to Dr. Sherri Weiler, who is directing the production as well as playing a principal role (Prince Orlofsky).

“The characters represent well-to-do Chicagoans in an era that was in many ways more elegant and gracious, but also more chauvinistic, than our own,” Weiler said.

Stars include several Shorter College music faculty members: sopranos Linda Lister (Adèle) and Regina Zona (Rosalinde), tenor Brian Nedvin (Eisenstein), and baritone Matthew Hoch (Falke). Tenor Ben Perkins from Marietta, GA, sings Alfredo, the Italian opera singer, and bass-baritone William Supon, from Cedartown, GA, sings the role of Frank, the warden. Rounding out the cast is local soprano Dagmar Schmitz-Carlton (Clara), tenor Terrell Shaw (Dr. Blynt), and comic actor Wendell Barnes (Frosch).  Shorter College music faculty member Elizabeth Blood will accompany the Alabama performance on piano.

For more information contact: Dr. Nathan Wight, 256-782-5876 or nwight@jsu.edu.

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