This is WESA Arts, a weekly newsletter by Bill O’Driscoll providing in-depth reporting about the Pittsburgh area art scene. Sign up here to get it every Wednesday afternoon.
Pittsburgh’s Pride Month is getting its own weekend of opera. The “delightfully queer” June 7 and 8 program doubles as the fully staged debut of Thousand Bridges Opera, a company created by a couple of singers out to make this venerable art form more accessible.
Co-founders Alicia Jayourba and Bridget Johnston met in 2018, while both were performing in Cedar Rapids Opera’s production of “Brigadoon.”
The eponymous village in Lerner & Loewe’s classic musical appears only once a century. If new opera companies aren’t quite that rare in Pittsburgh, they’re hardly an everyday phenomenon.
Pittsburgh native and CAPA High School grad Jayourba and Carnegie Mellon alum Johnson were on a mission.
“We both really wanted to create the kind of opera company that both of us wanted to work at,” she says. “A place that paid all of their artists, a place that was affirming of their artists, respectful of their artists, but also engaged in community.”
Opera troupes have been trying to shed an image of stuffiness and exclusivity for decades. As its name implies, Thousand Bridges says there’s still work to be done. “We really loved the idea of building bridges into our community,” Jayourba says. “We want to make sure that everybody knows that opera is accessible. It is there for them.”
This “100% percent women and queer-owned company” launched last year and has produced several shows since. One was September’s Un Ballo in Mascara, for which Thousand Bridges took over a South Side brew pub with drag queens performing to live opera singers.
They’ve also launched the project Music 4 Grandfriends, for which they bring groups of 5- to 7-year-olds to an elder-care facility to take music classes with residents. (At the first session, says Jayourba, “The kids came in and one of the residents said, ‘I don’t know when the last time I saw somebody that age was.’”)
This week’s program includes two one-act operas, one old and one quite new, to be performed by all-local professional casts Sat., June 7, and Sun., June 8. The venue is the Margaret Partee Performing Arts Center, a storefront theater in Bellevue.
Jodi Goble and Basil Considine’s “Meow and Forever: An Opera in Two Cats” is a 2024 romantic comedy about a recent college graduate named Bailey, her best friend, her new girlfriend, and her two mischievous felines. The 40-minute piece features a cast of five led by soprano Sarah Nadler, as Bailey.
And yes, both cats are also played and sung by humans.
“We thought it was just the most adorable opera,” said Jayourba.
The other one-act is “Daphnis et Chloé,” Jacques Offenbach’s 1860 comedy with a cast of eight, based on the Greek myth about two innocent shepherds schooled in the ways of love by the god Pan. Jayourba calls it “a pastoral romp.” In a nod to the opera tradition of the gender-swapping “pants role,” the male character Daphnis will be played by mezzo-soprano Johnston, with Emily Gallagher as Chloe, and Hayden Keefer as Pan.
Both operas are performed in English, with live piano accompaniment by Jaime Cohen. Flutist Julia Myers joins Cohen on “Daphnis et Chloé” to perform a slimmed-down arrangement of a score typically assigned to a full orchestra.
While many challenging issues face the LGBTQ community this Pride Month, Thousand Bridges’ company-premiere program is one of celebration. That is why Jayourba and Johnston picked “Meow and Forever” in particular.
“We wanted to tell a story of queer joy,” Jayourba says.
More info is here.