It’s that time of year again—CU Boulder’s New Opera Workshop (CU NOW) has taken over the College of Music, and the world of opera will never be the same.

Every summer, CU NOW hosts an extended workshop where graduate voice students and alumni have direct interaction with living composers and librettists to develop and perform their music over a few weeks—resulting in premieres at Houston Grand Opera, San Francisco Opera, Wexford Festival Opera and more. This year, CU NOW again welcomes composer and librettist Mark Adamo and his new work “Sarah in the Theatre” about the legendary American opera conductor, impresario and stage director, Sarah Caldwell.  

“Other than the best acronym in the business, CU NOW serves as a laboratory—an incubator for pieces that are going to be produced and commissioned at some point,” Adamo says of the program founded in 2010 by Leigh Holman, the College of Music’s associate professor of opera and director of our Eklund Opera Program. “Generally, the composer and the librettist come in, and either they want to work out certain things musically that they haven’t tried before, or develop it dramatically. It’s a pretty flexible brief.”

Adamo has been a guest artist here before to workshop “The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.” The opera premiered in 2013 but Adamo wasn’t quite satisfied with the end product. He brought the work to CU NOW in 2017 to create a revised, compressed version that he says was transformational. “It was a great, great experience, I have to say. We had a fabulous time together. So I’m very grateful to be back,” Adamo says.

Hannah Benson, an Artist Diploma student in opera and solo voice, says the workshop was a draw for her attending CU Boulder. In her first year participating, she’ll play the lead role. “CU NOW is unique in that it’s such a good environment for learning, including how to be professional and how to work efficiently in some higher stakes,” she says.

Working on brand-new material offers CU NOW participants the opportunity to trust their instincts and try new things in a collaborative space. Benson notes the experience has helped her to break past mental boundaries and push the limit of her craft. 

“The thing that’s the most different is that what we’re working on is tangibly new,” Benson says. “When you’re working on something that you’ve been with for a while, it can sometimes feel like it gets stale. With this experience, things are always changing.”

“Sarah in the Theatre” focuses on the real character of Sarah Caldwell (1924-2006)—the first woman to conduct the Metropolitan Opera, the second woman to conduct the New York Philharmonic, and chief conductor and artistic director of the Opera Company of Boston which she founded in 1959. 

“A great figure, but one of the reasons that we may not know her so much today is that she never met a budget that she couldn’t blow through,” Adamo says of Caldwell’s well-documented financial mismanagement. “She could be thoughtless and negligent to her artists. It was all constantly a race between the genius and the demons.”

“Sarah in the Theatre” aims to explore what makes a show come to life by highlighting Caldwell’s collaborators behind the scenes. It tells the story of Caldwell’s incredible rise and fall, and offers an honest look at artistic geniuses and what they sacrifice for their art.

For Adamo, the heart of the show comes to one question: “How do you love someone who can do as much damage as they can do good?”

Join us for a semi-staged production of “Sarah in the Theatre“ on June 13 at 7:30 p.m. and June 15 at 2 p.m. in the Imig Music Building’s Music Theatre, N1B95. Performances are free and open to the public, and include a deep-dive, moderated talkback.