Feb 6th 2009
"The Loathly Lady" World Premiere on April 1, 2009

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new comic opera,
The Loathly Lady, with music by Paul Richards and words by Wendy Steiner is being premiered on April 1 at University of Pennsylvania's Irvine Auditorium. The event is the finale of the 10th annual Penn Humanities Forum.

The Loathly Lady is an original comic work in three acts. The plot is based on Geoffrey Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale (c. 1400), in which a cruel knight must discover what women want most. The Loathly Lady's knight meets a series of opinionated characters in the course of his questing -- Sigmund Freud, Jane Austen's Emma, Sheherezade, Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare's Titania, the Lady of Shalott.

In this comedy of male-female misunderstanding, magic and science come to blows in the figures of Merlin and Freud. Can we speak to each other across the gulfs of time and gender and world view? The answer is "perhaps," and the process of finding out, we hope, will be a feast for the ears, the mind, and the heart.

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THE CAST:

Julianne Baird, Soprano


Maiden/Elf Queen/Lady of Shalott/Loathly Lady

Jeffrey Behrens, Tenor


Freud/Oberon

Ruth Cunningham, Soprano


Titania/Virginia Woolf/Lady-in-Waiting #1

Susan Hellauer, Alto


Queen Guenevere/Emma Woodhouse

Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, Soprano


Sheherezade/Eliza Doolittle/Lady-in-Waiting #2

Thomas Meglioranza, Baritone


Knight

Drew Minter, Countertenor


Merlin

Gary Thor Wedow, Conductor

Parthenia, A Consort of Viols

Piffaro, The Renaissance Band