Aria412 presents a drama inspired by folk, popular and operatic music, as aging composer, Robbie, enlists his past to inspire his future.
Aria412 presents a New Mercury Collective Production
I Hear America Singing
Book and Lyrics by Daron Hagen
Daron Hagen, Director
Robert Frankenberry, Music Director
Featuring Robert Frankenberry, Christopher Scott & Desirée Soteres
Three middle-aged Juilliard grads rehearse numbers from the revival of a musical revue called I Hear America Singing prior to a backers’ audition. Is it a dream, a mid-life crisis, a reunion, or an intervention? Love, the unreliability of memory, and personal reinvention intertwine as they swap old and new songs -- from pop song to art song, Victorian parlor tune to operatic aria, agitprop to jingle -- compulsively recontextualized by Robbie, a becalmed middle aged commercial composer striving to regain his self-confidence and sense of identity by obsessively revising the show that launched his career on Broadway twenty years earlier.
**The audience for the May 9th showing of I Hear America Singing will be filmed and appear in the recording and movie release of the show. All audience members will be credited on the movie and all audience members will be required to sign a video release form.
