"Opera in the Graveyard" offers spooky fun at Centenary College

SHREVEPORT, LA — Students in The Singers’ Workshop at Centenary’s Hurley School of Music have transformed their fall showcase into a Halloween-themed musical treat for local audiences. The Singers’ Workshop presents “Opera in the Graveyard,” an original collection of spooky scenes from well-known operas, on Saturday, October 27 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, October 28 at 2:30 p.m. in Centenary’s Anderson Auditorium. The performance, along with a “haunted” post-performance reception, is free and open to the public. The audience is encouraged to come in costume.

Cindy Sadler is Artist-in-Residence at the Hurley School of Music and director of the Singers’ Workshop, an ensemble opera and musical theatre performance course that helps Centenary students develop dramatic skills and stagecraft and prepares them for building a performance career in the real world. Sadler is directing “Opera in the Graveyard” along with Dr. Gay Grosz, Singers’ Workshop accompanist, as musical director.

“Opera in the Graveyard” features scenes from Mefistofele, MacBeth, Hansel & Gretel, The Magic Flute, Rusalka, Il trovatore, The Medium, Dido and Aeneas, and more.

“The students chose the theme for this performance and have been developing their roles by working on paraphrase, translation, and detailed character development assignments that help them flesh out the world their character inhabits and the relationships they have,” explains Sadler. “Although the scenes are quite disparate, we’ve woven together a storyline, so it’s more than a collection of moments – themes and characters and story emerge across the entire program.”

Singers’ Workshop students have also taken charge of marketing and promotion for the event, including the addition of the reception and haunted house as an added bonus for the audience. “Artists need to know how to promote themselves,” says Sadler. “They often don’t get any education in that except in the school of hard knocks, but the Singers’ Workshop specifically focuses on helping them gain some of these skills.”

For more information about “Opera in the Graveyard,” contact Cindy Sadler at csadler@centenary.edu.

 

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