No, the problem with the big houses now is that many of their conventions - the huge orchestra and chorus, traditional storytelling within the fourth wall, sometimes the proscenium itself - are 19th-century givens that artists adapt using modern subject matter or modern theatrical techniques to hurdle the inconveniences of the stage setup. That’s more like moving from small budget to big budget filmmaking, and it happens all the time. The challenge is not just one of scaling up, of a composer of tight, explosive works creating one to fill the Met, with a huge orchestra and chorus and the capability of producing hundreds of costumes and huge sets for a single production. Now with her Metropolitan Opera commission in hand, you wonder if this theatrical natural will encounter problems not of her own making in fulfilling it. After that, Proving Up(2018) was another intimate work of “grim claustrophobia” that packed a punch. ![]() ![]() ![]() But Mazzoli had given notice of her theatrical chops with SALT (2012 BAM Next Wave Festival) and Songs From the Uproar (2012), another BMP production that had a rapturous critical reception and has since seen at least four major productions in the U.S. Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves, a BMP project, became a smash hit at Opera Philadelphia and is seeing many more productions as time goes on. True, Morrison has an almost unerring eye for talent, but sometimes - think composer Missy Mazzoli - it’s not so much that people don’t recognize the potential, more that they don’t know how to use it. What happens when art organizations find themselves outdated, at least in part? This is opera history from time to time, and it’s what has allowed Beth Morrison Projects to flourish in North America. Missy Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves at the 2017 Prototype Festival | Credit: Dominic M.
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