VERDI'S LA TRAVIATA
Saturday, November 15, 2008

In association with the
Virginia School of the Arts

7:30 pm
EC Glass High School Auditorium

Director's Notes
7:00 pm
Auditorium Balcony Lobby

Sung in Italian with English supertitles.

The Opera Symphony Orchestra and members of the Lynchburg College Choral Union conducted by Francesco Milioto.

A true story of indecency that turns to tragic love.
Opera on the James will open its 2008-09 season with a production of Verdi’s unforgettable tragedy, La traviata. The opera will be staged in a new time and place: Hollywood, California during the 1930s, an era where exploitation and debauchery lurked beneath the bright lights and glamour of ‘tinsel town.’ The same story as the Garry Marshall film, “Pretty Woman” (but with a happy ending) and the 1937 Greta Garbo film, “Camille” and based upon Dumas’s novel, “The Lady of the Camelias,” the opera is fast-forwarded into the 1930s Hollywood culture among the rich, the famous, the glamorous movie stars and the studio moguls of the day. Echoing the tragic story of many well known film stars, we enter that shady world of human exploitation, where countless beautiful young women vied for fame and wealth as Hollywood starlets, only to lose their self-respect, their identity and their souls in the process. The high cost of human tragedy is felt anew in a time and place that Americans remember from the silver screen. Click here for full plot synopsis...