I designed the scenery for Heartbeat Opera’s 2018 production of FIDELIO, for the small 200 seat Nagleberg theater at Baruch Performing Art Center in NYC. This adaptation positioned Florestan (here Stan) as a wrongfully imprisioned Black Lives Matter activist, and his wife Leonora (here Leah) imagines going undercover as a prison guard to free her husband. Heartbeat collaborated with 6 prison choruses to record real incarcerated performers singing the famous prisoner’s chorus, the video and sound recording of which became a centerpiece of the show. The show was such a hit that Heartbeat organized a tour, scheduled for 2020, which was rescheduled after COVID for 2022. This started at the 700 seat Rodgers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and continued to 3 West Coast venues, from the 500 seat Broad Stage in Santa Monica to the 1800 seat Mondavi Center at UC Davis. The 2018 production used the exposed existing architecture of the Nagleberg Theater as an intergral part of the design, so the design for the tour required a considerable rethink. Click on the images below to see representations of both productions. Met Live Arts also recorded the entire opera at the Met Museum with a high quality multicamera capture; the link to which is below.
