Event

Amahl and the Night Visitors

AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS
Music and libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti

Amahl and the Night Visitors Features Elisabeth Harrington, HSU vocal professor and one of the north coast's most spectacular voices, as the Mother; Jacob Smith (?) as Amahl (you may remember him as Oliver in FRT's production of Oliver last holiday season); Luke Sikora, James Wright and Steve Nobles as the three Kings, Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar; Jeremy Webb as the king's Page; and a host of familiar community theater adults and children in the chorus of Shepherds and Shepherdesses.

ITS INCEPTION
One of the most well-known and best loved American operas, Amahl and the Night Visitors has the distrinction of being the first opera commissioned expressly for television. At the request of NBC, Menotti composed this one-act opera (under one hour long to fit television's 1/2 to one hour format for TV shows) as the first televised opera in the "Hallmark Hall of Fame" series. It premiered on Dec. 24, 1951, broadcast live from NBC Television Theater studios in NYC. The original filmed version of the debut was played every year at Christmastime for several years, until the film was lost.

The inspiration for the opera was the painting "Adoration of the Magi" by Hieronymus Bosch.

WHAT MAKES IT INTERESTING
The story is dramatic and interspersed with humor as well. The music is lush and exotic, lively and majestic, and invokes another time and place. The characters are broadly drawn, and according to the composer's instructions, "all the action and characterizations should be dictated by Amahl's point of view: the seeming severity of the mother, the occasionally colloquial conduct of the three Kings, the visit of the shepherds, the theft of the gold, and the miracle - all these should be interpreted simply and directly in terms of a child's imagination."