Marble City Opera at Central Cinema
Central Cinema is pleased to be teaming up with Marble City Opera for a series of filmed productions of their pandemic-era productions, offering a big screen encore of performances many fans may have missed. Join us every other Wednesday in August for this exciting local arts collaboration!
TOSCA by Puccini
Directed by Marya Barry
Conducted by Brian Holman
Filmed by Jim Johnson Productions
“Tosca” is a political thriller set in Rome during the Napoleonic wars at a time of great political unrest. The action takes place throughout a tense 24 hours in June of 1800. The plot centers around three characters – Rome’s diva Floria Tosca, her lover Mario Cavaradossi (a painter), and the corrupt Chief of Police, Baron Scarpia. Scarpia has long lusted after Tosca. When he suspects Cavaradossi of assisting an escaped political prisoner, he seizes the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. He plots to manipulate Tosca into revealing the prisoner’s hiding place and Cavaradossi’s involvement so that he can have her for himself. Scarpia has Cavaradossi captured and offers Tosca a horrific bargain – give herself to Scarpia, or he will kill her lover. What will she choose, and who will survive?
I CAN’T BREATHE by Brandon Gibson & Leslie Burrs
Directed by Jonathan Clark
Conducted by Garrett McQueen
Filmed by Jim Johnson Productions
“I Can’t Breathe” is an opera that explores themes of grief, loss, love, identity, and hope. It was inspired by and written in the wake of repeated instances of fatal police brutality. The stories told are NOT dramatizations of any real-life incident. Instead, we meet six fictional characters from different walks of life, each named for a different archetype. Lives that in one way or another are forever changed when innocent interactions with law enforcement go wrong. The opera highlights how things like good manners, a clean-cut appearance, and compliance with orders too often can’t protect people of color from being treated as inherently dangerous. Six vignettes portray different facets of the African American experience and ultimately seek to answer the question, “How many more”?
AMELIA LOST & SHADOWLIGHT: Two by Larry Delinger
AMELIA LOST – Inspired by Amelia Earhart and a homeless woman whom composer, Larry Delinger encountered in California. The opera uses Amelia Earhart’s actual words to create the story. The homeless woman believes that she is Amelia Earhart experiencing her final flight as well as mental flashes that take her in and out of her various realities. Filmed by Philip Marlowe
SHADOWLIGHT – Art, light, and friendship tell the story of celebrated African-American painter Beauford Delaney, who left the segregated South for the heady freedom of the Harlem Renaissance and Bohemian Paris. Famous singers, actors, writers, and artists adored him, Foremost among them his ‘spiritual son,’ writer James Baldwin, who credits his beloved mentor with teaching him how to live, learn, and see. This genial soul, frequently suicidal, was plagued by poverty and schizophrenic voices. Art became his lifeline, and he filled hundreds of bright canvases with joy and hope. Writer Henry Miller called them ‘canticles to the sun.’ Delaney’s journey out of darkness, ‘the misery,’ he called it, ‘of which the jewel of life is formed,’ is a splendid testament to the courage and resilience of a gifted man who found in the mystical marriage of color and shape the healing grace of love. Filmed by Jim Johnson Productions