Opera on Tap, America’s premiere dive bar opera company, presents a libretto reading of The Inner Circle, a soon-to-be operatic rendering of the novel by T.C. Boyle.
An Opera by Daniel Felsenfeld
Libretto by Kate Gale
Directed by Kira Simring
Can there be a timelier subject for an opera than Dr. Kinsey? The controversial Svengali or hero (depending on who you ask) who either enlightened or corrupted a captivated culture (also depending on who you ask), whose name we know but whose legacy has yet to be fully or appropriately explored, especially on the operatic stage. The story, while universal, is also one of the great archetypal American social tragedies: the rise-and-fall of the ahead-of-his-time thinker, the groundbreaker who had to labor in semi-secret in the face of a culture that simply did not understand.
Kinsey’s story is about the very discovery of—or at least the discussion of—sex in what was then a far more puritanical country, and it is a subject to which opera is ideally suited and yet with which it has a complicated history (opera audiences being, at least as popular assessments would have it, essentially conservative). T.C. Boyle’s take of Kinsey is more nuanced—he tells the tale not through the voice of the protagonist, but through John, one of his associates, a trusted ally and researcher, one of the many whose lives were overturned by their association with the (in)famous Doctor Sex.
Commissioned and produced by Opera on Tap, incubation by the cell.