Beauty and The Seven Beasts

Presentation

Magic Mirror promises "true love" within 7 dates. Beast (part man, part toad) is one of the magic mirror system operators and is paired with his new client Beauty to find her true love. She goes on 7 virtual dates arranged by Magic Mirror Systems, each possessing one of the 7 Deadly Sins. Obviously, the dates go terribly in many different ways, and through the story we see Beauty and The Beast falling in love. Will he be able to declare his love to her before time runs out?

This 90-minute opera will be collaboratively written by 7 librettists and 7 composers. The prologue, interludes and epilogue will be written by a lead creative pair (composer and librettist), and then each date / sin (scene) will be written by a different pair. There will be two live performers, Beauty and Beast. Each of the seven characters she meets on her seven dates will be pre-recorded, though Beauty will react and reply to them, live in the show. Each date will be filmed on location, giving more variation on set than it is possible with traditional opera.The music is scored for an orchestra of nine musicians (which can be pre-recorded if the health context requires it), plus electronics. The piece has been designed to be performed in a socially distanced manner, and very flexible given its use of pre-recording and video, which should also facilitate future revivals.

Artistic Team

The opera will be written by a team of 14 composers and librettists, organised in seven pairs, and with one of them ensuring a leading and coordinating role. This organisation allows us to have a common thread running through the work, while at the same time presenting a wide range of musical languages.

All of them are promising young artists that have shown a lot of promise with their music, and most of them have already written operas, with several of them having made very well-received operatic debuts with us. This means that the team combines familiar faces and voices with new ones, but also reassures us in the sense that we know the quality of their work and have already developed a solid working relationship that augurs well for this new project.

Teams:
Composers: Vahan Salorian, Lewis Murphy, Alex Woolf, Lucie Treacher, Sasha Scott, Jude Obermuller, James Garner
Librettists: Dominic Kimberlin, Jennifer L. Williams, Louis Rembges, Anna Pool, Annie Jenkins, Tom Powell, Ellie Taylor
Director: James Hurley
Conductor: Berrak Dyer
Costume Designer: Anne-Karine Lie
Beauty: Katherine Aitken
Beast: Benjamin Lewis