Postponed from November
to April
RSBE had its premiere at University of Alabama in February 2020, right before things closed down. The second production, scheduled for Amarillo Opera, had to be rescheduled due to COVID. It is now the third production, the second having been done recently at Kennesaw State University. They did their production completely online. In order to do so, they needed to change the premise of the opera. The original idea is that a group of students go to a mysterious building in a small town and the objects they see inside trigger memories. That was too much togetherness as a premise during COVID. So they switched to an online class where the professor asked each student to prepare a reflection, possibly prompted by an object.
And so here we are now seeing the end of the tunnel on the 2020-21 COVID-19 pandemic. The cast is vaccinated, but masks and social distancing is still very much the right thing to do. But the show is being done live, before a minimal audience. So we are going with the Kennesaw premise, but moving it to a live, in-person classroom. I guess this is a bit like directors who move the Mikado, from the 19th century to the late 20th, or Carmen from 19th century Spain to the era of the Spanish Civil War.
RSBE is scheduled for its next production in June and at this point, I'm not exactly sure if we will go back to the original premise or use this new one. We are adjusting to the times...
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