Springfield Regional Opera opens their new season celebrating the Leonard Bernstein centennial with a performance of "Trouble in Tahiti" tonight (Sept.28) at 7:30pm in Clara Thompson Hall at Drury University. Opening the evening will be Samuel Barber's short (VERY short!) opera "A Hand of Bridge." SRO Music Director Dr. Christopher Koch, who conducts tonight's performance, calls "Trouble in Tahiti" "a really interesting work, because musically speaking, I think you could very much argue that it's the seed for 'West Side Story'" in terms of the musical styles and genres Bernstein was working with in the 1950s. "It's kind of jazzy; you can hear Copland and Gershwin." Is "Trouble in Tahiti" an opera... a musical... or what? Koch calls it "something between opera and a musical. It doesn't really have dialogue, so it's maybe 95 percent an opera. But it's got a feel and a style that's just 100 percent Bernstein." The plot concerns a day in the lives of a married couple with a young child,
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