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History of Lyrical Opera Theater

History:

Lyrical Opera Theater was founded on December 6, 2013, and transitioned into being a non-profit 501(c)(3) administrated by volunteers in May 2017. LOT wished to affordably enrichen people's lives in its local Utah community with a professional community opera company, to provide local artists, both professional and upcoming, with training and performing opportunities where they could stay home with their regular, income providing jobs and families and to provide a way for community opera companies world-wide to have better means of producing high quality, low-cost productions to assure the longevity and prosperity of opera making it more affordable and accessible everywhere.

53 people attended LOT's first concert in 2014, and it now has an annual outreach of over 7,500. LOT has successfully produced full operatic productions of Madama Butterfly (two productions), Tosca (two productions), La Bohème, Carmen, Falstaff, La Traviata, Rigoletto, Lucia di Lammermoor, Gianni Schicchi and Pagliacci. LOT has built an educational outreach program in elementary schools introducing opera to 5,300 students annually and performs concert gigs in events such as the annual Summer Art Fair in the Eccles Art Center in Ogden, Festa Italiana and Western Stampede. LOT serves seniors in senior living centers providing them events and concerts and does an annual fundraising Masquerade Party. LOT donates hundreds of hours of master level training to artists throughout the Salt Lake and surrounding counties.

Some more detailed history about our operatic productions...

2014: Lyrical Opera Theater began with innovative, transformative ideas for the operatic world to make it more artist friendly and lower production costs while improving quality including: A) Performing entire operas accompanied by full orchestral accompaniment tracks…tracks that did not exist for complete operas. We partnered with Lyrical Opera Products who would produce the tracks while LOT would perfect them through performing with them. B) We used rear-screen projection scenery with English supertitle translations for our backdrops lowering scenery and stagehand costs. They were blended with the accompaniment tracks into video projections. C) We wrote down and distributed our staging in advance to our artists so they could practice at home diminishing rehearsal time and venue rental costs. We created the ways to accomplish these. Heart's Song was our opening "Classy Concert" followed by a full operatic production of Madama Butterfly, the result of our innovative efforts and launching Lyrical Opera Theater into being.

2015: We performed a full operatic production of Puccini's Tosca, based on the real life Italian political struggles of the 1800s. It is a battle of wits and wills, of passion and pain. The young opera diva, Floria Tosca, becomes trapped between her allegiance to her rebel lover and the scheming of a vicious police chief who will stop at nothing in his lust for her. We expanded our pool of local Utah artists and our audience, improved our marketing by reaching out to local TV stations, opened and maintained social media accounts, expanding our database and distributed postcards. We improved our projection scenery innovating a way to pull our screen further upstage and created new scenery pieces. We engaged a photographer and videographer so we could document our performances better. We performed in the historic Midvale Performing Arts Center strengthening our ties with the Midvale Arts Council. We joined the West Jordan City arts council. We started putting together an educational outreach assembly for elementary students. We performed "Classy Concert" for senior living centers and Ferragosto. We did artists trainings, held Master Classes and improved our website.

2016: We moved our operatic performances to the spring and performed Puccini's La Bohéme, a popular classic about the simple joys and heartbreaking sorrows of a group of young Parisians. It was our largest production yet. We were able to double-cast some of the characters, further expanding our local artist outreach. We had a sold-out house for the first time. We expanded our educational outreach by beginning a partnership with ARTs Inc., providing "Little Red Riding Hood…a children's opera" assemblies for elementary aged children, an assembly which had a 10-minute educational introduction to opera followed by the opera performed by local artists. We performed for 22 schools in the 2016 – 2017 school year with approximately 9,000 students. We continued our "Classy Concert" series for senior living centers and the newly formed Festa Italiana which festival attracted 10,000 attendees.

2017: We performed Carmen by Bizet, a steamy story of seduction, jealousy and maniacal murder, was our spring 2017 production. It had some new challenges in that originally, Carmen was performed with spoken dialogue. We wanted to keep it as close to Bizet's original idea of it by using the dialogue, however it was quite extensive. We had to reduce the dialogue and come up with a new way of doing the projections since we would have to follow the spoken dialogue with the projections. We updated our projection method using PowerPoint slides where one slide would contain video and the next a spoken dialogue screen. This update proved very useful in future productions. We also began to involve dancing in our productions and decided that it upgraded the entertainment value of our productions so much that we wanted to involve it in all future productions…if possible. Carmen went so well, that we felt it was time to upgrade our company and the only way we could do that was to transition into being a non-profit. We received our 501(c)(3) status on May 30, 2017 enabling us to receive public funding. We continued our elementary educational outreach assemblies visiting 20 schools during the 2017-2018 school year and performing for approximately 8,500 children. We continued our "Classy Concerts" series singing again at the Festa Italiana. As a newly formed non-profit, we began our fundraising efforts by producing a Masquerade Party which turned out to be widly popular. We started building a donors list and were audited so we could apply for grants from foundations. We started building a partnership with the Utah Division of Arts & Museums and Zoo Arts & Parks (ZAP) in Salt Lake County.

2018: We wanted to do a comic opera and chose a rollicking, frolicking, character-driven comedy full of slapstick humor and philosophical truth…Verdi's final opera, Falstaff. This is one of the most difficult operas in the operatic repertoire as it seemed like Verdi was just fed up with opera, opera singers and the operatic world in general and set out to torture and take revenge on all aspects of it ending the opera with "Tutti gabbati" (All are fooled!) being sung over and over again in one of the most spectacular fugues ever written. We continued our elementary educational outreach assemblies visiting 20 schools during the 2018-2019 school year for approximately 8,500 children. We started "Lyrical Logs" which gives a "Behind the Scenes" look at what we do and added educational videos to YouTube. We continued our "Classy Concerts" series singing again at the Festa Italiana which had an attendance of 10,500 people. We continued our fundraising efforts once again producing a Masquerade Party and applied for our first foundation grant from the Sorenson Legacy Foundation which we received. We received training on how to use the Foundation Directory and continued to build our donors and business partnerships.

2019: "Farewell past, happy dreams of days gone by. The roses in my cheeks already are faded." Verdi's La Traviata was our spring production. We had the most ticket sales ever. We expanded our artist pool by double-casting some of the leading and comprimario roles. We continued our elementary school outreach assemblies for the 2019-2020 school year but ended up visiting only 12 schools with approximately 5,400 students as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the end of the school year in 2020. We continued our educational video series, Lyrical Logs. We performed Classy Concerts at senior living centers, the Festa Italiana, West Jordan's Western Stampede and at the County Library series, Serendipity. We built business relationships by joining the West Jordan and the Utah LGBTQ+ Chambers of Commerce. We produced a Masquerade Party fundraiser event with donated auction baskets from local businesses. We received grants from the Utah Division of Arts & Museums and Zoo Arts & Parks (ZAP), Sorenson Legacy Foundation, Walmart, Amazon Smile and PayPal. We continued building our patron data base, marketing techniques, our social media presence and improving our website.

2020: You have to wonder about an opera that was originally supposed to be named "La maledizione" (The Curse) that happened to have been scheduled just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. Rigoletto, as the opera was eventually named, challenged LOT maximally. It was scheduled, cancelled at the last minute, then rescheduled in a new venue. We had to innovate using green-screen technology with some of our vulnerable artists and finding ways to make a venue that was not designed for theater, work for theater. Ultimately, COVID-19 spread through our cast, and we had to cancel our last two performances. However, using the new technology of live-streaming provided us with a means of presenting our production world-wide opening up a whole new audience and allowing home-bound individuals to enjoy live opera productions. Our educational outreach assemblies were shut down and we were unable to produce our annual Masquerade Party. Instead, we innovated using our newly aquired green-screen technology to produce Christmas Cards videos where we brought in artists individually, audio and video recorded them singing to classical Christmas tracks, then blended them together making it look as if they were singing together. We sent these video Christmas Cards to our patrons asking for donations and raised as much money as our popular Masquerade Party did. The quick COVID-19 response from our Federal and State governments helped us survive financially.

2021: Salt Lake County saw the need for a community theater in the ethnically diverse southwest side of the Salt Lake Valley, a community LOT already served and built the Mid-Valley Performing Arts Center. LOT was accepted to perform its operatic productions there. We made the ambitious goal of doubling our operational capacity, our audience and our artists outreach by expanding to two operatic productions per season requiring LOT to raise double the revenues than in previous years. LOT was honored by being asked to perform a Classy Concert at the Mid-Valley PAC's ribbon cutting then produced Madama Butterfly there in September, a vastly improved production with 22% increased audience size. LOT navigated a huge learning curve as this venue had complex fly, lighting and sound systems, and new ticketing and contract systems. We achieved a long-time dream of providing pianists performing opportunities by bringing a 9-foot Steinway into the lobby and lining up a roster of pianist to perform before each opera. We coordinated with the Salt River Arts Society in rural Afton, WY and took Madama Butterfly on tour providing many residents with their first opera ever. We rewrote our educational outreach assembly, planned to run it through LOT, and set up performances through the Utah Division of Arts & Museums to perform it in rural, underserved school district.

2022: LOT fulfilled its goal of doubling its operational capacity, audiences and artists outreach by expanding to two operatic productions each year. It produced Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Puccini's Tosca in the new Mid-Valley Performing Arts Center in Taylorsville, UT using all local Utah artists and double casting most roles. It continued providing its free educational series "An Insider's Guide" to audiences before each opera performance and did Classy Concerts before each opera performance engaging pianists and other musicians. It connected with local school districts to set up and perform its Little Red Riding Hood...a children's opera assembly in elementary schools both rural and local and set up and ran a new educational outreach program for junior and senior high students, "Night at the Opera" a fieldtrip for students and their teachers where they attended an actual opera performance. It performed Classy Concerts for the Festa Italiana and Summers Arts Fair.

See past performance details by clicking here...

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