It’s an old and oft repeated joke that opera heroines have a high mortality rate. And it’s true that some of opera’s best known and most beloved female leads – Mimi, Gilda and Violetta to name a few – meet an untimely death, singing to the bitter end. It’s an undisputable fact they have short lives and no one has ever really questioned it.
Until now.
Kathleen Cahill (Photo: Courtesy Salt Lake Acting Company)
Playwright Kathleen Cahill explores the tragic lives of these, and other, characters in her Fatal Song, a farce/cabaret – call it what you will – that explores this very question.
Utah Opera will be staging Fatal Song in the Jeanné Wagner Theatre in the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center in an abbreviated four-performance run starting Thursday.
“It takes place in a dressing room in purgatory, where all the great divas meet and compare notes,” said Jerry Steichen, the Utah Symphony’s principal pops conductor.
“They’re suspicious about why they’re dying,” Cahill added. “They wonder if it’s a serial killer.”
Cahill, resident playwright for Salt Lake Acting Company, wrote Fatal Song several years ago for Leon Major, director of the Maryland Opera Studio. “He commissioned it for the voice students,” she said. The work has undergone a few changes since then and has been performed several times since its premiere. “It’s always been performed by students,” Cahill said. “This will be its first professional performance.”
Leading off the cast are two well known Utah sopranos, Jennifer Welch-Babidge and Celena Shafer. The two have been seen in previous Utah Opera productions.
Both are looking forward to this show. “It’s an interesting take on things,” Welch-Babidge said. “It’s going to be fun and amazing for the audience.”
It’s also going to be a challenge for not only Welch-Babidge and Shafer, but for the others in the cast as well, since each plays several characters from different operas. “It’s going to be fun switching,” Shafer said, “because it’s fun to play different characters and show their differences.”
One of the things Welch-Babidge likes about the show is how the characters intermingle. “How they interact with one other is interesting.”
The audience will be sitting onstage either in chairs or at tables cabaret style, so they become part of the proceedings. “The audience will feel like they’re part of the experience,” Shafer said. “It’s a great concept.”
Others in the cast are sopranos Megan Phillips Cash and Amy Owens; mezzo-soprano Kirsten Gunlogson; tenor Tyson Miller; and baritone Christopher Clayton.
Steichen will accompany the singers at the piano.
- PERFORMANCE DETAILS
- What: Utah Opera, Fatal Song
- Venue: Jeanné Wagner Theatre, Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center
- Time and Date: 7:30 p.m., Nov. 14-16, 4 p.m., Nov. 17
- Tickets: $35 and up for general admission, $50 and up for cabaret tables (prices increase $5 when purchased on day of performance); $20 extra to add a themed dinner, either Spanish or French, call 801-533-6683 to order
- Phone: 801-355-2787 or 888-451-2787
- Web: www.utahopera.org
- ALSO: Question and Answer session with opera artistic director Christopher McBeth, immediately following each performance, onstage at the Jeanné Wagner Theatre, free