Summary
"What a black eye for Marin County," she chided, "that the work of a local composer had to be presented 170 miles away." (That's 70 mües farther than the distance from Donner Pass to Fort Sutter.) CoincidentaUy, another cannibalism-themed stage musical opened on Broadway that year - Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. It ran for 557 performances and won several Tony Awards.
The 81 -year-old [Ron McFarland] fondly recalls the Sun's story about The Donner Party, but laughs that von [Stephanie von Buchau], a longtime friend, overplayed the supposed controversy about his opera. "In order to be on the cover of a newspaper like the Pacific Sun [the story] had to be somewhat controversial," he says. "And the only way she could make it sound controversial was to ask - why the hell aren't they doing it in Marin?" The opera was eventually performed by the Berkeley Symphony under Kent Nagano and has recently enjoyed performances at the College of Marin and the Tiburón Music Festival. In fact, he says, the opera doesn't even "spend too much time on all ofthat [cannibalism] . There are scenes where they talk about cutting people up and eating them - but we make note that they're starving and desperate."See the full content of this document
Extract
Ordeal by Libretto
30
years agoMarin couldn't eat a whole one 30 years ago this week.One of the many challenges facing regional opera productions is to convince the average suburban that the grandest of Western music tra...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
