New Works Collective offers three world premiere operas in an ongoing grand experiment

There are Kleenex boxes on some of the folding chairs in the rehearsal room at the Sally S. Levy Opera Center in Webster Groves. Today is a run-through of this year’s New Works Collective by Opera Theatre of St. Louis—three brand-new, 20-minute operas, “stories for St. Louis, chosen by St. Louis,” debuting February 6. It’s less than a week until showtime. And Steve Ryan, the company’s director of production and operations, has made a reasonable hunch that the people watching this rehearsal are going to cry.

It feels like a longshot. In setting and in tone, these operas seem to have little in common with the tragic theatrics of Madame Butterfly or La Traviata. The first, Black Coffee, is about a St. Louis twentysomething trying to form connections. (“How do you make friends as a grownup?” she sings, frantically Googling. “How do you make bonds that never end?”) The second, Family Style, features a Taiwanese immigrant dreaming of serving his signature ribs at a “deluxe hole in the wall.” They’re modern, realistic. No one dies.

And the third opera on this year’s bill, Kandake, might be an even more unusual choice for a short piece with a small cast and sparse staging, but it, too, is not opera in its classical European milieu. It explores the true story of Kandake Amanirenas, a warrior queen in the ancient African kingdom of Kush. 

These three world premieres—wildly different from both each other and from the world’s best-known operas—are part of a grand experiment now in its third year. “This is not happening anywhere else in the country that we know of,” says Nicole Ambos Freber, Opera Theatre of St. Louis’ managing director. And that’s what makes it so cool.

Opera Theatre of St. Louis recruits talented people to submit their ideas for a short opera. Then, instead of the organization’s leaders choosing the winners, they turn over the selection to 10 markedly diverse St. Louisans from outside the opera world, the titular New Works Collective. 

“These are not necessarily opera people,” Freber says. “Some of them are musicians, but some of them have no music background. Some of them are writers, musicians, artists, activists. We wanted not the opera people in the room making the decision, but community members, audience members, who were invested and excited to do this work.” 

Composers and librettists are also excited by the opportunity. This year, Opera Theatre of St. Louis received 158 applications. These aren’t fully fleshed-out pitches, Freber notes. “You’re just reading a very short concept, basically, of the piece, and listening to work samples, or reading work samples from writers. Even the creator sometimes isn’t quite sure where they’re going with the piece.” 

Helping them figure that out is part of the New Works Collective experience. After opening applications in August of 2023 and sharing the collective’s decision in January 2024, Opera Theatre hired an ensemble cast capable of performing all three shows (this year, six singers and four dancers) and a single director and conductor to shepherd all three. The company came together multiple times over the course of a year to work, rework, and fine-tune each piece until it sings. Now they’ll be staged together as a brisk evening of three world premieres, hosted at COCA’s Catherine B. Berges Theatre from February 6-8.

Says Freber, “We built multiple workshops into this process so that we can sort of see this work evolving as it goes, to offer feedback and really to encourage the creators to play, to experiment, which is something so often in opera you don’t have the budget to do.”

That playfulness, that experimentation, is on display at last Friday’s rehearsal. The staging is still bare-bones—Opera Theatre’s high-tech projection system, which will provide three different backgrounds for the three shows, is not yet being employed, and no one has costumes on yet. One of the performers, Emilie Kealani, has a cold, though you’d never know it when she starts to sing.

Indeed, Kealani’s performance as Mia in Family Style has the full attention of the rehearsal audience. She portrays the 17-year-old, college-bound daughter of a Taiwanese immigrant, played by bass Paul Chwe Minchul An, who has been dreaming of opening a restaurant of his own after years as a dishwasher. Meilina Tsui’s music is gorgeous, and as they sing their way to a future that isn’t quite what either of them had envisioned, sure enough, eyes begin to well up across the crowded rehearsal room. By the opera’s end, three people are dabbing their eyes; one is openly weeping.

That’s a big impact for just 20 minutes on stage. But that’s the power of these stories, a 400-year-old art form remixed by modern artists, for St. Louis and chosen by St. Louis. It’s enough to bring a tear to your eye.

Tickets for the New Works Collective are on sale now for $35-$55.