Following the success of our new Merton street opera Drifting Dragons last year, we are delighted to announce our 2017 street opera production of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte. It’s a story about love and friendship, cheating, and testing the one you love. Both funny and moving, we’re sure you’ll love following our characters rather complicated love lives taking place on the streets of Merton!
Our performances will be completely free and unticketed in a variety of places in Merton town centres high – popping up in cafes, pubs, supermarkets, libraries and perhaps at the bus stop! We hope you’ll follow our story and hear the beautiful music as you’re going about your normal life. Perhaps you can do the weekly shop and see some opera at the same time?!
We’re again partnering with Merton Music Foundation to offer local schools complimentary workshops teaching young people about opera, and with organisations such as the New Horizon Centre and Merton & Morden Guild to engage local elderly people with this fantastic story of love, confusion and betrayal. We’ll keep you updated with what we get up to as we go along.
Last summer we performed Drifting Dragons in lots of fantastic cafes, shops and other local businesses. We’ll soon be talking to all these places again about performing there this summer but if you run a business in Merton and are interested in us performing part of our street opera in your store please do get in touch!
The performances will be this summer but we’re currently planning our Research & Development period. This is where we work out how to adapt a 3 hour opera sung in Italian with full orchestra to the Merton high streets (perhaps not the easiest task!) But don’t worry, it’ll be sung in English, our singers accompanied by 3 instrumentalists (probably guitar, accordion and violin) who are able to move around and it’ll definitely be much shorter than 3 hours!! Plus it’s free and unticketed so you can stay to watch all the story or just a bit. So do check back here soon for more news about our workshops, news about our singers and how we get on adapting the story to bring it to life on the high street! We really hope you’ll join us for a bit of street opera soon!
The production is kindly supported by the Arts Council, Merton Council, Wimbledon Foundation and individual donors.