InsightALT: TEVYE'S DAUGHTERS
Sunday, November 2, 2023, 2pm
The DiMenna Center for Classical Music
450 West 37th Street
New York, NY 10018
We are thrilled to announce the return of the InsightALT series, featuring concerts of new operas in development under the auspices of ALT’s nationally acclaimed Composer Librettist Development Program. The first concert of the 2023-24 season features TEVYE'S DAUGHTERS, by composer Alex Weiser and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann.
Inspired by the darker, grittier stories by Sholem Aleichem not included in Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye’s Daughters centers on the tale of the beloved milkman’s younger daughter Shprintze, who falls in love with a young man above her station. Like so many women of her generation, Shprintze has no choice but to navigate her crisis with silence. Galvanized by the literature of little-known female Yiddish writers, as well as tkhines - Yiddish prayers designated expressly for women - Tevye’s Daughters rewrites that silence, giving voice to a generation of women whose stories have frequently been suppressed, omitted, even erased. The opera moves between a shtetl in Ukraine in 1907 and a summer cabin in the Catskills in 1964 as Tzeitl, Chava, and Beilke, now old women, haunted by a vestigial memory submerged for more than half a century, can no longer look away from the past. The arrival of Rose, a granddaughter grappling with her own sexual identity, incites the sisters not only to remember Shprintze’s traumatic story, but to come to terms with their shared tumultuous present.
CAST
Tevye: Gideon Dabi
Golde: Indira Mahajan
Rose/Shprintze: Kate Johnson
Tzeitl: Jennifer Zetlan
Beylke: Gina Perrigino
Khava: Heather Johnson
Arontshik: Ryan Lustgarten
Conductor: Kelly Kuo
Pianist: Deborah Robertson
InsightALT events were created to give the public an intimate, insiders look behind the scenes of American Lyric Theater’s process of creating new operas. Each event features a concert reading of a new opera in development at ALT, featuring guest singers from the world's leading opera houses, followed an interactive discussion between the audience and the writers behind each work. These conversations, moderated by ALT's founder, Lawrence Edelson, use Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process to engage with those experiencing the opera for the first time to help the writers on their journeys.