Opera Carolina stages pop-up opera performance for Puccini’s “The Girl of the West”

Opera Carolina will be presenting Puccini’s “The Girl of the West” on April 23rd, 27th, and 29th.

Can opera – a centuries-old Italian art form be an effective medium for a Western – that quintessentially American and (relatively) new genre? Puccini thought so.

Opera Carolina’s new production of The Girl of the West (La fanciulla del West) is our first international collaboration with the Teatro di Giglio in Puccini’s hometown of Lucca, Italy, the Teatro Lirico in Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia, and the New York City Opera.

New production design by acclaimed Italian director Ivan Stefanutti. Sets and digital projections built by Opera Carolina. New costumes by Atelier Nicolao, Venice, Italy.

Opera Carolina is celebrating “Girl of the West” with a pop-up opera performance and authentic Wells Fargo Stagecoach ride on Monday, April 17th.

Puccini’s The Girl of the West contains a prominent character – one of the good guys – who works for the Wells Fargo Company in 1840s California. Ashby is on the trail of the bandits. Wells Fargo – Opera Carolina’s season sponsor – has an authentic stagecoach (found in a collector’s barn and restored in 2009) at its History Museum on Tryon Street, which is the perfect tie-in with Puccini’s opera about the Gold Rush, card cheats, a love triangle and the Wild West.

On Monday, April 17th, 2017, the event will kick off at 11:15 a.m., when Jay Everette, Wells Fargo community affairs manager, and Maestro James Meena, general director and principal conductor of Opera Carolina, will deliver brief remarks.

Then from 11:25 a.m. to 11:35 a.m., Aleksy Bogdanov (Sheriff) and Jason McKinney (Ashby, the Wells Fargo agent) will sing selections from The Girl of the West, with Emily Jarrell Urbanek on piano.

At 11:45 a.m., Maestro Meena will invite guests to see the stagecoach leave for its trip down Tryon St. Everette, Meena and opera singers board stagecoach bound for the Belk Theater. The Concord stagecoach will make its way – powered by actual live horses, just as it would have been in the 1850s – from the Wells Fargo History Museum to the Belk Theater. Once the stagecoach arrives outside the Belk Theater, a red carpet will be rolled out and the banner announcing The Girl of the West will be erected.