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With all due respect to Verdi and Puccini, the three founders of New Wave Opera company are feeling a little burned out on storylines about damsels in distress, with or without tuberculosis. So the soprano, the mezzo, and the composer walked into a bar and started their own opera company.
Enter New Wave Opera, founded this year by Portland Opera chorus members Lindsey Rae Johnson and Lisa Neher (the soprano and the mezzo, respectively, though Neher also composes) and Kimberly Osberg, a composer. The bar is the haunted mansion-themed Raven’s Manor at Southwest 1st Avenue and Oak Street downtown, which will host New Wave’s first formal production this fall, the spooky Night of the Living Opera on Oct. 21 and 23.
New Wave Opera performs works by all-living composers and is dedicated to showcasing diverse stories and life experiences. The new company plans to stage at least two full productions a season, plus a variety of pop-up performances, workshops and educational opportunities throughout the year.
“We’re letting people know that there is a ton of contemporary repertoire out there—we don’t have to keep hearing the same pieces over and over again, even though we love them,” Osberg says. “But we’re missing out on so much. There’s funny opera, there’s moving opera, there’s opera that speaks to things that young people could relate to more easily.”
And certainly other local opera companies in town are putting on challenging work—Johnson mentions Portland Opera, Renegade Opera and OrpheusPDX as examples—but nobody is dedicated solely to contemporary work. Getting to put it on with her friends has been a longtime goal of Neher, New Wave Opera’s president.
Classical musicians and instrumentalists have a long tradition of chamber groups of four to six people, but singers have a slightly more gig-to-gig existence, she says. “I’ve always had string quartet and woodwind quartet envy.”
At Music in the Manor, a showcase in August, opera fans got a sneak peek of what New Wave Opera is all about. For a measly $5 cover charge, the audience saw a selection of opera scenes and arias. The singers were flanked by a 4-foot candelabrum on one side of the raised platform stage near the front of the bar and a skull with glowing green eyes on the other. A creepy doll watched over pianist Stephen Lewis from above.
New Wave Opera sought out Raven’s Manor as a venue because of its dedication to storytelling, both in its décor and its elaborate “elixir experiences,” which are cocktail mixology events with a dash of escape room. (A popular conversation starter between sets at Music in the Manor was, “Have you been to the bathroom yet?” to discuss the bloodstains on the tile floors.)
The repertoire for Night of the Living Opera, which the company will cycle through about three times over the course of the evening, will be particularly well suited to the horror venue. There’s THUMP by Osberg, with text adapted from “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. Neher composed she conjures with librettist Bea Goodwin, which is set right after a witch-burning in 17th century Scotland. Serial Killers and the City by Del’Shawn Taylor and librettist Joanie Brittingham imagines a group of fancy ladies having brunch à la Sex and the City and gossiping about their latest kills rather than their recent hookups.
“When you walk in there and you hear the THUMP piece and the serial killer stuff, you couldn’t find a better place,” Osberg says. “It’s like it was made for these operas to be done there.”
The vibe at the bar, in the historic Henry Failing Building, was rowdy and casual. After the arias from Serial Killers, an audience member yelled out, “Yeah! You tell him!” over her drink. After two singers donned cat-ear headbands and finished “Bored Cat Duet” by Jodi Goble and librettist Basil Considine, the crowd clapped—and erupted in a spontaneous chorus of hisses and meows.
Photographer and classical music fan Rachel Hadiashar drove in from the burbs to check out New Wave Opera.
“I’m thrilled to see opera coming off the big stage and expensive tickets,” she says. “This is a $5 cover. I can handle that. While drinking a cider? That’s awesome.”
GO: Night of the Living Opera at Raven’s Manor, 235 SW 1st Ave., 971-319-6182, newwaveopera.org/night-of-the-living-opera. Multiple performances 5 pm-midnight Monday and Wednesday, Oct. 21 and 23. $10. 21+.