Announcing our spring 2025 ProductioN
Art by Lau and Vanessa
“Pioneers ... reformatting the opera experience from the grand to the deliberately intimate. Ingenious.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“This BOLD, adventurous company strives to make opera a visceral, intimate and immediate ‘encounter.’”
—The New York Times
A brand new 90-minute adaptation, sung in French with new English dialogues.
Music by Charles Gounod
Original Libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré from Carré's play Faust et Marguerite
Co-Adapted by Jacob Ashworth and Sara Holdren
Newly Arranged by Dan Schlosberg
New English dialogues by Sara Holdren
Directed by Sara Holdren
Music Directed by Jacob Ashworth
A classic tale. A wild retelling.
A lonely scholar makes a bargain with the devil, and all hell breaks loose. Heartbeat Opera’s distinctly American adaptation tells the story of Faust and Marguerite — a man who wildly misuses his regained youth, a young woman whose potential for life and love is cut tragically short, and the ravaged community left in their wake. Retelling one of most popular operas of all time, we ask what happens when the soul hasn’t evolved along with the mind? When voracious ego rules us, and reckless forward motion is all?
Baruch Performing Arts Center
55 Lexington Avenue 25th St., New York, NY 10010
**Stay tuned for Cast and Creative Team Announcements**
MEET THE Director
Director // Sara Holdren
Sara Holdren is a director, writer, and teacher originally from the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia. She is the theater critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, the recipient of the 2016-2017 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and the co-founder of the theater project Tiltyard. Recent projects include As You Like It (Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival), Black Snow (Atlantic Theater School), Cymbeline (NYU Grad Acting), Tiltyard’s MIDSUMMER (which she co-adapted from the plays of Shakespeare) at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Three Sisters (Two River Theater), and bicycling 3,900 miles across the country with her partner, Beau, a writer. Sara is a Drama League Fellow, a graduate of the Acting Shakespeare program at RADA, and has been both a lead artist and a mentor at the Mercury Store. She holds a BA in Theater from Yale University and an MFA in Directing from Yale School of Drama. She lives in Jersey City with Beau and their feline friends, Masha and Danny. She agrees with the devil: Рукописи не горят.
Presented with:
And supported by the following organizations:
Heartbeat Opera’s Spring Festival is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Heartbeat Opera is also proud to be supported by the Howard Gilman Foundation.