Photo by Kate Raines.

The work of Andy Warhol set the art world on its head, blurring the lines between high and low and the notions of what defined artistic and commercial work. It is only fitting then that “Andy: A Popera,” a show exploring Warhol’s life, work and legacy, started with pop-up performances of singing soup cans in a supermarket aisle, evolved into a cabaret show and is now becoming an adventurous, irreverent pop art-cabaret-opera mash-up scheduled to premiere in Philadelphia in September 2015. Related Links 

Andy – A POPera at Opera Philadelphia

Bearded Ladies Cabaret website

Bearded Ladies Cabaret on YouTube

The piece is a collaboration between Opera Philadelphia and the experimental cabaret company the Bearded Ladies. The creative process and the intended result suggest a daring and ingenuity that truly celebrates the subject. Both organizations are previous Knight Arts Challenge winners, and “Andy: A Popera” is being developed with Knight Foundation support.

Classical composer Dan Visconti, who recently completed a multi-year residency with opera companies, including Seattle Opera, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, New York City Opera, the Glimmerglass Festival and the Metropolitan Opera, recently joined the “Andy” creative team and is charged with creating the unprecedented musical hybrid.

“When I was asked to be part of this project I was elated,” he says. “I’m terribly interested in Andy, in both his work and as enduring phenomenon. His work translates so readily to music …  it’s been really fun to find the musical counterpart to the visual impulse in Warhol’s work.”

“This is my first opera, but I do a lot of chamber and orchestral music, and a lot of it is about blending different genres,” says Visconti, also a classically trained violinist, whose work has been honored with the Rome Prize and Berlin Prize fellowships and the Bearns Prize from Columbia University. “I bring all kinds of pop and folk music sensibilities into classical music. I’m always mashing up different styles with classical music and finding new things, so it’s great to continue that exploration in a much-larger-scale operatic form.”

For “Andy: A Popera,” the issue for Visconti is to explore “what are the elements that make opera great that we want to preserve and what are the elements of cabaret that we also want in it.”

Building a foundation

Visconti’s joining “Andy: A Popera” is a milestone in what has been a rather deliberate two-year process. Stage 1, as it was called, built on a series of pop-up test performances in places as disparate as grocery stores and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In Stage 2, the songs and scenes coalesced into a full-fledged cabaret show that enjoyed a two-week run at the lobby of The Wilma Theater in July, and now the piece is into its final stage, being turned into a sui generis opera.

“Dan plays with popular music and popular sound in really fascinating ways,” says John Jarboe, artistic director of the Bearded Ladies. “We needed someone who, even if he was going to work very differently from us, understood what it means to live in the spaces between [musical] forms. And Dan’s music does that.”

 “What we found ourselves asking as we worked on the piece is what do opera and cabaret do really, really well,” he says. “The other composer [in the project], Heath Allen, is really versatile, with a lot of experience in jazz and cabaret and has written a lot of original music and arrangements [for ‘Andy’]. But music functions so differently in opera than it does in cabaret. “

The expectation, says Jarboe, is that Visconti will use some of Allen’s pieces and musical ideas but also create a larger, overarching form that will both frame and carry the story.

“Opera makes epic our most intimate emotions,” Jarboe says. “And then the cabaret element can be the Warholization of things; it can be the pop version; it can simplify it, make it catchy and memorable. So we are using the two forms to explore these ideas we discovered in our research into the work of Andy Warhol.”

 Creating a new work while incorporating someone else’s work in a collaborative creative process might strike some composers as quite a challenge. But Visconti, who was initially approached by Opera Philadelphia and began to familiarize himself with the Bearded Ladies and their work during the summer, says that Allen “has written some amazing music for the show, which was purely a cabaret, and I’ve been working closely with him.”

“We want to keep some of the spirit of [cabaret], the informal rapport between the singers and audience. And there will be things like [characters] talking with the audience,” says Visconti. “ It will have the informality that will bring to opera a lot of things it’s currently missing: communication with the audience and a sense of fun.”

Infused with collaboration

Such a collaborative approach has been one of the notable elements in the development of “Andy: A Popera.” Early in the process, the company performed songs and scenes as works-in-progress to assess the response of the audience, even asking for suggestions about the order of some of the songs — a sort of do-it-yourself, homemade market research.

“From Stage 1 to Stage 2 we cut 13 songs, “ notes Jarboe. “We really created a lot of material and we have been weeding it out. It’s challenging and scary to say, ‘This is not quite ready yet but we want to show it to you and learn from your reaction.’ Those experiences, whether they were a success or a failure, were super informative and changed the way the piece developed.”

And while those performances of not-quite-ready material might have been “challenging and scary,” that doesn’t mean that there was no fun involved. Jarboe quietly chuckles as he retells the tryout of a particular piece in the show, a nod to Warhol’s famous Campbell’s Soup prints, which led to what sounds like, well, a very Warholian moment.

“The grocery store pop-ups were really exciting. Being in the soup can aisles in a soup can costume … We even had soup cans buying soup cans,” he deadpans. And the cans are not in the show just because of their pretty labels. “Right now, we have some of the soup cans singing the soup can ingredients using musical quotes from classical opera.”

Fernando González is a Miami-based arts and culture writer and a frequent contributor to Knight Blog. 

Soup Can Andy-A Popera from John Jarboe on Vimeo.