Heartbeat Opera's QUANDO to Play Five Performances at the McKittrick Hotel

The McKittrick Hotel, home of Sleep No More, will host the New York premiere of Heartbeat Opera's QUANDO, a short film and live performance mashup. The show will offer just five performances in a strictly limited engagement from April 7-9 in The Club Car.

During the 75-minute presentation, audiences will be challenged to re-examine their perceptions of art and its role in societal transformation. Some of the most beautiful and famous music from the operatic canon becomes the landscape for this fierce social satire of sex, activism, and the performance of everyday life.

Music from Giuseppe Verdi's operas La Traviata and Don Carlo and Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice are repurposed and refashioned into a 25-minute short film that follows a starry-eyed young couple as their night on the town unravels into a surrealist swirl of decadence, intrigue, and ultimately, vengeful justice. While watching the film, live composer-performers will disrupt and reconstitute the music from the score for a one-of-a-kind theatrical experience. No two performances and endings are alike.

The film stars Lauren Michelle, Brian Vu, and Shelley Washington, and the live event features Mx. Oww and Jessie Cox. Musical director Daniel Schlosberg arranged the film score for a mix of instruments and electronics.

QUANDO is co-produced with Long Beach Opera, directed and edited by Tee Vaden, and produced and conceptualized by associate artistic director Derrell Acon. Photography direction is by Kathryn Boyd-Batstone and production design is by Yuki Izumihara.