UrbanArias at Artisphere
UrbanArias has been invited to perform as part of Artisphere’s Birthday Celebrations
UrbanArias will present a FREE 10-minute preview of The Filthy Habit, a comic opera by Peter Hilliard and Matt Boresi. The Filthy Habit tells the story of Susan and Gil, newlyweds who struggle with Mayor Bloomberg’s new smoking ban in 2003. An update of Wolf-Ferrari’s Il segreto di Susanna, The Filthy Habit is a hilarious look at our modern attitudes toward smoking, and the pariahs we have unwittingly created.
Sunday, October 9 at 2 p.m.
in the Black Box Theater at Artisphere
PLUS!
Interactive Musical Mad Libs and Other Improvisational Fun!
Admission is FREE; this performance is family-friendly.
Artisphere is located at 1101 Wilson Blvd. in the Rosslyn neighborhood of Arlington, VA (near the Rosslyn Metro and Key Bridge). For maps, directions and parking information, click here.
UrbanArias’ performance is part of a weekend of celebrations at Artisphere – many other fantastic groups will be performing there as well. Visit Artisphere’s website for more information.
The Filthy Habit is just one of the operas we will present at the UrbanArias Festival this spring.
The UrbanArias Festival 2012 will take place from April 13, 2012 to April 22, 2012, also at Artisphere in Arlington.
More details here!
About the Artists on October 9
Amedee Moore, soprano, recently sang the role of Clorinda in La Cenerentola and covered the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro at Opera North. Last year, Ms. Moore performed the role of Clotilde in the western hemisphere premiere of Handel’s Faramondo. In 2009, Amedee performed the role of Susanna in OSU’s production of Le nozze di Figaro. Amedee received her M.M. from the Ohio State University in 2010 and B. M. in vocal performance from Wheaton College’s Conservatory of Music in 2008. Her other roles include Jenny in Three Sisters who are not Sisters, Madame Pompous in Too many Sopranos, Meg in Little Women, Frou Frou/ Praskowia in The Merry Widow and Sister Margaretta in The Sound of Music. Amedee Moore is currently attending the Peabody Institute in pursuit of her graduate performance diploma in opera.
American baritone Ethan Watermeier has performed a broad range of principal roles in opera, musical theatre, and plays throughout the United States and abroad at companies including Houston Grand Opera (world premiere of The Little Prince by Rachel Portman, and premiere workshops of Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata (Leonidas) and Jake Heggie’s End of the Affair (Henry)), Santa Fe Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, Aspen Music Festival, Théâtre Municipal, Castres, France, Hawaii Performing Arts Festival, Bailiwick Repertory, Theatre at the Center, Vital Theatre Company, and Little Theatre on the Square. For nearly two years, Mr. Watermeier performed Javert and Factory Foreman/Combeferre with the Broadway National Tour of Les Misérables. As a recitalist, his work focuses primarily on American repertoire, from early colonial song to works by living composers. In recent years, he has sung new compositions by and worked with Mark Adamo, Tom Cipullo, Ricky Ian Gordon, Jake Heggie, Martin Hennessy, John Musto, and Rachel Portman. In addition to performances with UrbanArias, Mr. Watermeier recently sang the baritone solo with Albany Pro Musica in Richard Einhorn’s critically-acclaimed oratorio Voices of Light. Also in the capital region he recently sang the baritone solo in Dello Joio’s Songs of Abelard with the Capital Region Wind Ensemble and the principal role of Darby in The New Old American Company’s historic and highly praised revival of the popular 1783 comic opera, The Poor Soldier, by William Shield and John O’Keeffe. At the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is currently pursuing his doctorate, Mr. Watermeier premiered the role of Joe Harland in Later the Same Evening by John Musto and Mark Campbell (World Premiere co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Art and the Maryland Opera Studio) and Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Maryland Opera Studio. He also sang the New York premiere of William Mayer’s A Death in the Family as Ralph Follet and can be heard on the premiere recording on Albany Records. A winner of both the 2002 Kurt Weill/Lotte Lenya International Competition and the 2002 Anna-Case Mackay Grant, he is a graduate of Northwestern University (BM) and the Manhattan School of Music (MM). This fall, he will be performing Admiral Von Schreiber in The Sound of Music at Olney Theatre Center. Mr. Watermeier is also a proud member of Actors’ Equity Association, National Association of Teachers of Singing, Children International, Greenpeace, and has recently joined the artist roster of Sing for Hope (singforhope.org) – a non-profit organization dedicated to “arts activism in action.”
Over the last 25 years, Joe Banno has established himself as an innovative, critically acclaimed director. In work that has been called “joltingly powerful”, “audacious” and “engagingly freewheeling”, he has brought his unique vision to more than 100 productions spanning classical and modern theatre, opera, musicals and film.
From 1997 through 2006, Banno served as artistic director of Washington DC’s groundbreaking Source Theatre Company, where he nurtured the development of new scripts and directed works by a who’s-who of contemporary American playwrights, including a multi-year cycle of plays by David Mamet.
Celebrated for his culturally relevant updating of classic plays, Banno’s Shakespeare productions have been seen at the Folger Theatre (where his staging of Romeo and Juliet won him a Helen Hayes Award for his direction), Washington Shakespeare Company, and the American Shakespeare Center (for a twice-extended, year-long run of King Lear).
Known as well for his work in musical theatre, Banno’s production of Evita – a collaborative project between Open Circle Theatre’s company of artists-with-disabilities and the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange – was a critical and popular hit. His world-premiere staging of Executive Leverage at Source received a Helen Hayes Award nomination for Outstanding Musical.
Banno’s productions at DC-Area theatres have, to date, been nominated for 32 prestigious Helen Hayes Awards, and have won 8 of them. Banno is also the recipient of the Mary Goldwater Theatre Lobby Award and the Bud Yorkin Award, both for excellence in directing.
As an opera director with over 30 productions to his credit, Banno’s recent successes with The Marriage of Figaro for Opera Delaware, Otello for Washington Summer Opera, Sweeney Todd with Wolf Trap Opera, and La Tragédie de Carmen at the Alba Music Festival (in Northern Italy) have reconfirmed him as a challenging and original interpreter of the artform.
Banno’s work has been seen on stages across the US, including a co-production with New York’s Blue Heron Theatre and the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, the inaugural production of LA’s Mutineer Theatre, a national tour for Opera Northeast, and productions at Theatre J and Adventure Theatre (DC), Milwaukee’s Renaissance Theatreworks (WI), Studio Roanoke and Aurora Opera Theatre (VA) and Marin Opera (CA).
Having recently begun taking on film projects, Banno completed his first independent feature, Sleeping and Waking, in 2008 (currently available on DVD and through Netflix), and has a Shakespeare-based film project in development, scheduled to shoot next year.
A frequent acting coach, guest lecturer, conference panelist, competition judge and theatre consultant, Banno has also served as general manager for a NYC-based classical radio station, headed a new-works funding initiative for Opera America and, for two years, co-hosted the official U.S. telecast of the Golden Globe Awards to the Arab world on Alhurra television. He has contributed reviews and articles on music and film to a number of publications, including Washington City Paper, where he was the opera critic from 1989 to 2008. He has been a classical music critic for The Washington Post since 1993, and for TheClassicalReview.com since 2009.
The last two seasons have seen Banno collaborating in the development of, and directing, five new works: the plays Elvis Blossom and Dear Abe (at Virginia’s newest incubator for original scripts, Studio Roanoke), the play Ngala Muti and the punk-rock musical Requiem (for the School of Drama at Catholic University, in Washington, DC), and the American premiere (in a freshly revised and newly orchestrated version) of the British theatre-for-youth musical, Spot’s Birthday Party (at Maryland’s Adventure Theatre).
He recently staged a double-bill of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and Ernesto Lecuona’s Cuban zarzuela Maria La O (set in 1950s Little Italy and Havana), as well as developing and directing a new musical-revue of songs from the 1930s and ‘40s by émigré Hollywood composers, From Berlin to Sunset – both productions for DC’s innovative music/theatre/dance collective, The In Series.
Last year, he guest-lectured in Pulitzer-Prize winner Tim Page’s seminar at USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism. And earlier this year, he began directing an internet video series with nutritionist Janis Jibrin, for the website TheBestLife.com, ranging from interviews to cooking programs to on-site restaurant features.
Coming up, Banno will be returning to Opera Delaware to direct The Magic Flute, and will direct his first show for DC’s American Century Theatre, a revival of Christopher Durang’s Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You.
Tessa Hartle has worked as vocal coach/repetiteur with such companies as Sarasota Opera, Opera North, Aspen Opera Theater Center, Aurora Opera, Chesapeake Chamber Opera, Opera Camerata, Inscape Opera Theater, and Zarzuela Di Si. She has collaborated and appeared in recital with members of the National Symphony, US military bands, and students and alumni of the Peabody Conservatory, University of Maryland and George Mason University, and is principal pianist of Inscape Chamber Orchestra in Bethesda, MD. Tessa has her Master’s degree in Collaborative Piano from the University of Maryland, where she studied with Rita Sloan, and her Bachelor’s degree in Piano Performance from the University of Michigan, where she studied with Louis Nagel and Katherine Collier and worked with Martin Katz. Tessa will return to Sarasota Opera in the winter of 2012 to assist on their productions of Carmen and Otello.
