What's this teen opera thing?

Act Too Studio Opera Workshop is an ongoing, student-driven educational arts project with performances throughout the year, including a fully-staged opera each summer. Our growing workshop includes students between the ages of 13-19 at varying levels of vocal development, musical skill, and experience. 

Why does this matter?

Though we went into this project with the goal of improving our students’ musical skills, the real understanding that came out of it for all of us is that opera is for everyone. As our students discovered themselves and their own truths in the music and in their characters, their driving motivation became to share this discovery with everyone they know. And then they did, with remarkable success. Just as our students surprised us with their initial interest in this project, they’ve also been the ones to show us that our conventional ideas about what most people will like or accept are just plain wrong.

Most importantly, though, what is vital about the arts, especially the kind that gets people out of their homes and into a community space like a theater, is that it makes us better people. Storytelling through the arts is how we share our most important truths with each other, and how we learn to understand both others and ourselves. It is the the way in which we bypass our prejudices and preconceived notions to discover the ways in which our inner worlds overlap with those we might view as “other.” It is the common language we all share. A society without the arts is a society without beauty, a society without understanding, and a society without hope. As our federal government embarks on a campaign to defund and delegitimize the arts, it is more important than ever for small businesses like ours to help keep the arts alive through the young people who will one day be in charge. 

Our students will not all become opera singers—most likely very few of them will. But they all will be a part of shaping the future of the arts in our society. They will be the ones who, in industry in education, determine our musical and artistic legacy.

What is Cosi fan "tutti"?

Yes, you read that right, our adaptation of W.A. Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte is so drastic, we’ve had to change the title! Once a humorous treatise on the fickleness of women (the title can roughly be translated to “All women are like that”), our modern take seeks to explore just how screwed up we all are when it comes to love, and how our preconceived notions about relationships, gender roles, and the nature of devotion lead us to disastrous (and in this case, hilarious) consequences.

Our extreme adaptation of Mozart’s popular opera features (among other things) time travel, gender-switching, fantasy tabletop role-playing, a Marriage of Figaro crossover, chocolate beverages, a twin-operated cafe, snorkeling gear, and some of the most beautiful music ever written.

Why do we need your donation?

We’re committed to keeping participation in the Opera Workshop accessible to all our teens, which means that we regularly seek donations to supplement student fees and help us pay for pianists for our rehearsals and performances, and for production expenses such as sets, costumes, lighting, space, musicians, and other artists.

For this production, we will be transforming the West End Community Room at Eastworks in Easthampton into an eclectic cafe (visited by time-travelers from the 1790s), complete with a pianist, a string quartet, and delectable chocolate treats. To make this all happen, we'll be renting 18th-century costumes and cafe fixtures, and everything we need to make the space our own.

The bulk of our funding, however, goes into the process itself. We've hired our musical adapter to transform Mozart's full orchestral score into a piece of classical chamber music. We'll be working with a local musical director to help us our teens really bring Mozart's beautiful score to life, and a fight choreographer to train our student sword fighters as safely and elegantly as possible. Above all, we value our students' training and the skills they'll acquire while assembling this production. To make this happen, we need your help.

Please consider throwing a few bucks our way and helping us to bring this exciting new production to the Pioneer Valley!

Act Too Studio Opera Workshop is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of Act Too Studio Opera Workshop must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.