Airline Icarus was commissioned by a small Vancouver opera company, Opera Breve, in 2001. Soundstreams’ Artistic Director, Lawrence Cherney, was among those who witnessed the project’s first public workshop. The untimely death of Opera Breve’s co-founder John Juliani in 2003 cut short the company’s plans to develop the work. Lawrence and Soundstreams continued to support… Read More
Hungarian-Canadian mezzo-soprano Krisztina Szabó has become highly sought after in both North America and Europe as an artist of supreme musicianship and stagecraft. Soundstreams is thrilled to be working with Krisztina for the first time on Airline Icarus, where she is creating the role of the Flight Attendant. We chatted with her via email in… Read More
Sweat takes place in a contemporary sweatshop, the multilingual libretto conveying the global nature of the garment industry. Departing radically from traditional opera, this piece sheds the orchestra and focuses on the musical and sonic potential of the human voice in counterpoint to the sound world of the sweatshop. Here are some thoughts from Juliet… Read More
Anton Piatigorsky is an award-winning writer of fiction, plays and librettos. As a playwright, he is the recipient of two Dora Mavor Moore awards for best new play, the Summerworks Prize, and the 2005 Siminovitch protege award for playwrighting. We chatted with him via email to find out how his partnership with Brian Current on… Read More
Airline Icarus is about the intersecting thoughts of passengers aboard a commercial airplane. It explores themes of hubris mixed with technology, the forced intimacy of strangers and flying too close to the sun. Over the course of the work, the plane becomes brighter and eventually vanishes. Composer Brian Current In September of 1983, a Korean… Read More
In November, we will spend a week developing Juliet Palmer’s opera Sweat and in June we will present a fully staged version of Brian Current’s Airline Icarus at the Daniels Spectrum. The idea behind the Salon was to give those in attendance a sense of the process required to get a new opera or musical… Read More
Kyle Brenders: I have a tendency to think of musicals as Fosse and Broadway but I have a feeling this isn’t what Acting Up Stage produces. Could you tell us a little bit about your company and how it fosters “new” musical theatre? Mitchell Marcus: While large-scale commercial musicals are certainly a key part of… Read More