Opera Workshop seeking excitement-seeking audience by Annette Germinario, reporter

    Opera Extravaganza by South Campus Opera Workshop will present scenes from operas and operettas in English this month.

    Live instrumental music, performances of acting and singing, costumes, movement, sets, lights—opera has it all.

    Opera is not just “high brow” entertainment.

    It may have started as an engaging pastime for the courts of royalty (after all, someone had to fund such extravagance), yet most of it comes from the hearts of bourgeois composers and librettists.

Opera composition spans many eras of music and continues to the present.

    The Houston Grand Opera has sponsored several American operas in recent years.

    Today, we might relate to opera as we do to musicals.

Five scenes and one entire opera fill out the Opera Workshop program.

    Most scenes are comedic; one is dramatic.

    Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell is an early English opera based on the tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, and her tragic love affair with Aeneas, a Trojan prince and warrior destined to found Rome.

    Hansel and Gretel by Engelbert Humperdinck is about the storybook siblings.

    Ariana Strahl and Lauren Germinario play the title characters and participate as part of the dual enrollment program for high school students.

    The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan, set in Japan, is a love story of aristocrat Yum-Yum and the poor minstrel Nanki-Poo.

    Die Fledermaus is a Johann Strauss operetta set in Vienna.

    The scenes from this well-known opera have all the necessary ingredients for fun: aristocracy, a maid, fake sentiment and scandalous affairs.

    The Marriage of Figaro, a favorite of opera goers, is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s runaway romp through the upcoming marriage of Figaro and Suzanna.

    The Impressario, another Mozart work, is a short, one-act opera, which will be performed in its entirety.

    The plot involves a couple of “dueling divas” auditioning for the same opera agent.

    Echo Wilson, adjunct instructor of piano and staff accompanist, will accompany the scenes.

    Opera Workshop is directed by Darlene Marks, instructor of music.

    Opera Extravaganza will be performed Saturday, Nov. 17, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, Nov. 18, at 3 p.m. in the Fine Arts Recital Hall (FAB 150).

    Admission is free.