March is Women’s History Month! All month long, we celebrate women in opera, both on stage and off.
Friday, March 26 at 3:00 P.M. CT – Live from Indy Terrace feat. stage director Rebecca Herman.
Ep. 40: For our final episode of Women’s History Month, we welcome stage director Rebecca Herman! Host Julie Fiore (Director of Audience Experience) sits down with Rebecca to explore her long and well-respected relationship with Austin Opera, punctuated by excerpts from Otello, Don Giovanni, and more. We’ll see you there!
More about Rebecca:
Rebecca Herman is Co-founder & Artistic Producer of Local Opera Local Artists (LOLA) in Austin, TX. In Feb 2020, she directed Dido and Aeneas for LOLA in collaboration with Panoramic Voices, a local choral organization. LOLA was in the process of producing a weeklong workshop of a new opera Good Country, by local composer Keith Allegretti and librettist Cecelia Raker, which features a role written specifically for a trans man, in March of 2020 that was canceled due to the pandemic. In 2019, she worked with Portland Opera as Assistant Director on Mozart’s La Finta Giardiniera, collaborated with Queen City Opera on The Magic Bullets (Der Freischütz) and Die Walküre, Act I, and directed a workshop of Lardo Weeping, a new opera by Peter Stopschinski and libretto by Terry Galloway with LOLA. Recently, she directed The Breasts of Tiresias at Portland State University. For the past 2 seasons she has directed Queer Opera’s weeklong workshops at Portland State University.
Other directing credits include Otello, Don Giovanni & The Daughter of the Regiment at Austin Opera and Assistant Director for Turandot, The Magic Flute, & Rigoletto at Michigan Opera Theatre as well as several opera scenes with students and young artists at various universities and summer programs, notably Des Moines Metro Opera and Baylor University. Since LOLA’s inception in 2015 Rebecca has worked with Co-founder Liz Cass to bring intimate operatic experiences to the Austin area and beyond with updated and new takes on the operatic and classical song repertoire such as La Femme Bohème; We Might Be Struck By Lightning: A pastiche of art song and dance; La Clemenza di Tito: A Retelling; and Diva Cage Match in Austin, a collaboration with David Lefkowich and Out of the Box Opera. Rebecca received an M.M. in Opera Direction from The University of Texas at Austin and both a B.A. in English Literature and a B.M. in Opera/Vocal Studies from Lawrence University.
Find out more on LOLA’s website: https://www.lolaaustin.org/about
