Excerpts from Bread and Circuses: The Wrestling Opera An Opera in Two Acts and a Wrestling Show Created with a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship and in collaboration with Ravensbourne University Cast and Creative Team Music by Liam Wade Words by Charles Ogilvie From an original concept by Mark Johnston With additional development by Julia Mintzer Produced by Eleanor Benson Music Director: Mark Johnston Stage Director: Julia Mintzer Assistant Director: Eleanor Burke Production Manager: Ryan Wilce Shaunie Flynn: Camilla Kerslake Ada Vance: Grainne Gilllis Voice of Vince Flynn: John Packard Voice of the MC: Liam Wade Piano: Mark Johnston Percussion: Darren Berry Video Game developed by Ravensbourne University Led by Dev Bye-a-Jee Animated by Philip Kakala, Sam Galloway, Jez Fermor, Sebastian Winnett In consultation with Charles Ogilvie and Sebastian Winnett The Program: The Twist and the Snap Johnny Vance: voice of John Packard, baritone Percussion: Darren Berry (21, 22, 23 September) STOP! Ada Vance: Grainne Gillis, contralto Shaunie Flynn: Camilla Kerslake, soprano The Squared Circle Mark Johnston, piano Blading and Bleeding Shaunie Flynn: Camilla Kerslake, soprano 1 Bread and Circuses takes the cameo appearance of Donald Trump on a 2007 televised wrestling event as a starting point for the libretto of a new opera exploring political rhetoric and America's cultural crisis through the lens of professional wrestling. In 2007, the now-President of the United States appeared in Wrestlemania XXIII, a huge, televised, stadium-based wrestling event. Trump, or the 'character' he was playing, gets caught up in a dispute with a successful wrestling promoter in what was billed as the 'Battle of the Billionaires'. Trump gets out of his ringside seat, body-slams the promoter and then pins him to a chair with the help of another wrestler. Then Trump proceeds to buzz cut and wet shave the character’s head in front of a stadium of over 80,000 screaming fans. Another 1.2 million watched via pay-per-view. This would not have been remarkable for a self-promoting property mogul with a soft spot for publicity were it not for what has followed. It is intriguing to consider that in this moment of scripted melodrama, and in seeing the crowd’s ecstatic response, Trump may have begun to shape his electoral strategy. The show explores how kayfabe—the portrayal of staged events within the industry of ​ ​ professional wrestling as 'real' or 'true'—might define an era. It isn’t about factual verifiability: it’s about emotional fidelity. As conspiracy theorist Alex Jones admitted to the New York Times, kayfabe 'rests on the assumption that feelings are inherently more trustworthy than facts.' This could sum up the theater of wrestling, notable recent electoral campaigns, and much of the western operatic canon. The work was born from a conversation about how thoroughly operatic American professional wrestling is: the scripted shows of the mainstream professional wrestling world use music, lighting, and special effects to showcase skilled professionals enacting complex melodramas of courage, ambition, love, and jealousy. Just as in opera, the disguises, deceits, asides, and grand rhetoric let the audience ignore logical inconsistencies on the way to an outcome they likely already know, whilst making abundantly clear who the heroes and villains are. Bread and Circuses: The Wrestling Opera runs 90 minutes in full. ​ It has a cast of 6 singers, 1 actor, and 2 wrestlers. It is currently scored for piano, and could be orchestrated for anything from a trio to a 70 piece orchestra. This showcase will provide a glimpse into the world of the piece and the lives of its characters. You can read the full libretto here. ​ ​ 2 Composer Liam Wade was the recipient of the Wagner Society of ​ Northern California William O. Cord Memorial Grant Fund in 2015. Wade’s one act opera, The Stranger The Better, co-written by ​ ​ librettist Vynnie Meli, won the 2016 Audience Prize at The Atlanta Opera’s 24-Hour Opera Project, and has subsequently been performed in Hartford, Austin, St. Louis, Berkeley, and San Francisco. His chamber opera collaboration with librettist John Grimmett, Part of the Act, was commissioned by Washington ​ ​ National Opera and premiered at the Kennedy Center on their 2012-13 season. His music has been heard on concerts at the La Jolla Music Society, ProQuartet France, Toronto Music Garden, One Ounce Opera (Austin, TX), Hartford Opera Theater, St. Louis Opera Collective, West Edge Opera, Academy of Vocal Arts, and Semperoper Dresden. In October 2017, an excerpt from his operatic scene, Rosies, with libretto by Caitlin Vincent, was performed at the Semperoper Dresden. ​ ​ Since 2018 the Wade/Meli operetta Boy Loses Girl (in the Beer Tent) has become the annual ​ ​ Oktoberfest tradition on its Semper Zwei/Semper Bar series. Wade will return to the Semperoper in September 2021. Wade studied composition with Philip Lasser, Howard Frazin, Kurt Rohde, Ross Bauer, and Jake Heggie. He holds degrees from The Longy School of Music of Bard College and the University of California, Davis. www.liamwade.com ​ Librettist Charles Ogilvie has made projects in ​ sculpture and art film at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Gloucester Cathedral, The Max Planck Institute (Dresden), the Ashmolean Museum, and the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. His work has been shown by the Saatchi Gallery and has been shortlisted for the New Sensations and Red Mansion prizes. He graduated with distinction from the Royal College of Art in Sculpture and with first class honors from Oxford University, from which he also holds a Ph.D. by practice in Fine Art. He was the production designer for Gothic Opera’s Der Vampyr, nominated ​ for an Off West End Award for Best Opera Production. He designed and co-authored a new translation for MassOpera’s all-female La Bohème. In ​ ​ order to write the libretto to Bread and Circuses he received a Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship in 2017. He worked as a director and cameraman in Baghdad during the second Gulf War and has art directed in commercial advertising and narrative film. www.charlesogilvie.art 3 Winner of the National Opera Association’s 2017 Directing Fellowship, Julia Mintzer's Der Vampyr for Gothic Opera was ​ ​ ​ nominated for an Off West End Award for Best Opera Production. Her interactive theatre piece Pizza Parlance was ​ ​ listed in Nombre Art Magazine’s '5 Must-Sees of Venice Biennale' and revived for the NWR-Forum Düsseldorf, STORE Contemporary (Dresden), and Toronto Museum of Contemporary Art. Julia directed Savitri for Hampstead Garden ​ ​ Opera, the first staged opera to return to London since the pandemic, to critical acclaim. She has developed and directed new work for the Helsinki Festival and Cornell University, directed the first full staging of Beethoven’s Fidelio with historical instruments in America, and led an all-female cast of La Bohème for MassOpera, hailed by The Theater Times as 'a fascinating, high-energy production'. She has made short films for The Pleiades Project and Ensemble Plus Ultra, and collaborated on art animations featured in Ambit Magazine. As a mezzo-soprano, Julia has performed leading roles at Washington National Opera, the Semperoper Dresden, and The Glimmerglass Festival. She made her UK debut this spring as Carmen with Welsh National Opera. She is the recipient of a UK Tier-1 Exceptional Talent visa. www.juliamintzer.com ​ After a bachelor's degree in Toronto and master's degrees in Stuttgart in violin, composition, and conducting, Mark Johnston worked as a house ​ pianist and opera conductor in Hildesheim, Zwickau, and Brunswick in addition to as a guest at the opera houses of Hamburg, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and at the Baden-Baden Easter Festival and Berlin Philharmonic. He has pursued a career as a concert violinist in parallel, performing a staged version of Kurtág's Kafka Fragments in 2017 and the complete Bach sonatas and partitas in one concert in 2020. Mark originated the core idea for Bread and ​ Circuses in a series of late-night musings on wrestling and opera, and has served as dramaturg and guru throughout its development, in addition to coaching, music directing, and conducting. markjohnston.de ​ 4 Soprano Camilla Kerslake is a BRIT-nominated English opera ​ ​ singer who was the first act to be signed to Gary Barlow’s Universal label Future Records, in 2009. She has gone on to receive international acclaim as a best-selling English Royal soprano, performing in arenas and stadiums all over the world. Camilla continues to diversify the uses of her enchanting voice, having recently provided her vocals to an Oscar- and BAFTA-nominated motion picture as well as being the National Football League anthem singer during their London games for four years in a row. Kerslake has released two studio albums, her debut self-titled album in 2009 and Moments, released in 2011, as well as singles: You Raise Me Up was released in 2014 and Little Red in 2016. With a refreshing honesty, her work explores the reality of love and loneliness in the 21st century as well as many of the frustrations that young women face. Thanks to Camilla’s talent for writing and the appeal she has gained throughout her career, she now writes a blog for Harper’s Bazaar. Camilla also boasts an impressive collection of press clippings, including the front pages of YOU Magazine, Daily Telegraph, Evening Standard, The Daily Express, Mail On Sunday, Daily Mail and HELLO Magazine. Alongside the writing and recording of her albums Kerslake has completed several arena tours, including one at the O2 arena alongside classical superstar Andrea Bocelli and internationally acclaimed Il Divo. Kerslake has given numerous performances of the National Anthem at various sporting events across the UK, including at Twickenham, Wembley and the Millennium stadium.