Well, here’s something you don’t hear every day: Courtney Love is going to star in an opera.
Yes, as in widow of Kurt, mother of Frances Bean, Hole founder Courtney Love. Hmph.
The opera is a new production called “Kansas City Choir Boy” by composer Todd Almond. Before you start envisioning Love in elaborate corsets and all manner of dramatic swishy togs, belting out arias in Italian, cool it a bit.
Almond’s opera is a contemporary marriage of pop and opera, and it’s not even clear that it’s an opera at all, really.
“When I say ‘opera’, I don’t mean it’s in an operatic style,” Almond told the New York Times. “I mean it in the sense that it’s a group of songs that tell a story. I write musicals, I write plays and I write what I call opera, which I think of as a form that opens the minds of both the performers and the listeners.”
So it’s a musical, but he’s calling it an opera? Sometimes. Sometimes Almond calls it a concept album.
Whatever the case, Love will carry “Kansas City Choir Boy” with Almond — there are only two characters. He told the Times he was a big fan of her work with Hole, and that as he was developing the production with director Kevin Newbury, he decided to send her the music. Almond started writing “Kansas City Choir Boy” while he was staying in a Kansas City hotel about eight years ago.
“It became a piece about a man and a woman in love in the Midwest,” Almond told the Times. “But then the woman sees something on the horizon that makes her realize that she has a greater destiny, and she follows that.”
Well, it seems a fitting role for Love, who is nothing if not dramatic. Things finally warmed up a bit between Love and Bean after some famously dysfunctional Twitter exchanges a couple years ago. That parents will embarrass their children is universal. That they’ll do it on Twitter, for the world to see, is more like the stuff of rock stars. “Twitter should ban my mother,” Bean once said.
“Kansas City Choir Boy” debuts in New York Jan. 8-17 at Here as part of the Prototype: Opera/Theater/Now festival.
