ABOUT
for your PROGRAMMING consideration
Scenes from Usher House and The Canterville Ghost, known together as Scare Pair.
““An entertaining hybrid of spooky stories and opera, providing fans of scary stories with an eloquent theatrical experience and fans of opera with a particularly colorful program.” ”
Scare Pair
This double bill was first presented by the Center for Contemporary Opera in New York in October 2017, and by LA Opera in June 2018. Scare Pair is a reimagining of earlier well-received productions of each opera.
Based on these successful runs, Scare Pair is now available for programming for the 2020-21 season and beyond. The production is ideal for medium-sized companies, and large companies with “second-stage” venues. Innovative use of projections and imaginative staging offer flexibility for adapting to the specifics of each house, while an accomplished production team ensures continuity of quality.
Scare Pair draws audiences young and old, with its ghostly theme a natural October offering. But the production is appropriate any time of year. And its running time — less than two and a half hours including intermission — meets audience demands for more compact experiences.
About Usher House
Usher House recounts the final days of the last two surviving members of an ancient family. A quintessentially Gothic tale, the opera features a high-strung recluse, a beautiful invalid and a sinister doctor, all hidden away in a crumbling manor house full of secrets.
In adapting Poe’s short story for the operatic stage, composer Gordon Getty found himself taking several liberties with the plot and characters.
“To start, I have made Poe himself the narrator who lives to tell the tale,” said Getty. “More radically, I have conceived him and the doomed siblings as types of an antebellum warmth and gallantry which hardly exist anywhere in the prose of the real Poe, and must be counter to his purposes here. I have added other gothic staples as well.”
Usher House had its world premiere in 2014 at Welsh National Opera. San Francisco Opera presented the U.S. premiere in 2015.
About The Canterville Ghost
Based on Oscar Wilde’s comic short story of the same name, The Canterville Ghost is a faithful adaptation of the original tale, in which a well-to-do American family buys an English manor house that harbors a centuries-old ghost. The new owners are unimpressed by the ghost’s numerous efforts to frighten them, and the family’s twin boys take great delight in tormenting the spirit; only the young daughter shows any sympathy for the ghost’s plight.
The Leipzig Opera presented the world premiere of The Canterville Ghost in 2015. The U.S. premiere of the opera took place in 2017 at the Center for Contemporary Opera in New York as part of Scare Pair.