Summer 2025, “VANESSA” opera by Barber, Heartbeat Opera, Williamstown Theater Festival, Musical Directors Jacob Ashworth and Daniel Schlosberg, Adaptation Jacob Ashworth, New Arrangement Daniel Schlosberg, Director and Set Design R.B. Schlather, costume terese wadden, light Yuki Link, hair and makeup Consultant Matia Emsellem, Fight/Intimacy/Movement Skye Bronfenbrenner, Production stage manager Brenna Comeau, Associate Scenic Design Erica Zhang, Producer Shannon Sindelar, rehearsal photography Arden Dickson, production photography Maria Baranova
“…Heartbeat Opera’s scaled-down staging of Vanessa at a strip mall WAS, by all accounts, an unqualified success.” - Vanity Fair
“The indisputable artistic triumph of W71 has been brought in from NYC: Heartbeat Opera’s 100-minute adaptation…Vanessa grabs the audience like a vise. Unforgettable, truly.”
— New yOrk Stage Review
“Unlike many abridged operas, this one lost little in being concentrated, partly because Gian Carlo Menotti’s intense, almost neurotic libretto profits, like a wailing babe, from tight swaddling. At Williamstown, the tight swaddling came in the form of R.B. Schlather’s chic, disciplined, minimalist production, using shadows cast on a long white wall to create a devastating X-ray of the story.”
— New york times
“Schlather’s alchemy of intense focus and dreamlike freedom honors the cyclic spell of Barber’s opera with reverence and verve… This Vanessa was, among other things, a master class in resourceful thinking: how to make a lot from a little. how to make something new from something old. And how to give opera a more accessible place in our lives — even if that means a strip mall.”
— washington post, “Pared-down ‘vanessa’ in a strip mall, demands a trip to the berkshires
