InsightALT: TEVYE'S DAUGHTERS

On Wednesday, November 20 at 7:30pm, ALT presents an orchestral workshop concert of TEVYE'S DAUGHTERS by composer Alex Weiser and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann. Inspired by the darker, grittier stories by Sholem Aleichem not included in Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye’s Daughters centers on the tale of the beloved milkman’s younger daughter Shprintse, who falls in love with a young man above her station. Like so many women of her generation, Shprintse has no choice but to navigate her crisis with silence. Galvanized by the literature of little-known female Yiddish writers, as well as tkhines - Yiddish prayers designated expressly for women - Tevye’s Daughters rewrites that silence, giving voice to a generation of women whose stories have frequently been suppressed, omitted, even erased. The opera moves between a shtetl in Ukraine in 1907 and a summer cabin in the Catskills in 1964 as Tseytl, Khave, and Beylke, now old women, haunted by a vestigial memory submerged for more than half a century, can no longer look away from the past. The arrival of Rose, a granddaughter grappling with her own sexual identity, incites the sisters not only to remember Shprintse’s traumatic story, but to come to terms with their shared tumultuous present.

ALT's Associate Artistic Director, Maestro Kelly Kuo conducts a world class chamber orchestra and cast of artists:

CAST

Tevye - Gideon Dabi

Golde - Indira Mahajan

Rose / Shprintse - Kate Johnson

Tseytl - Jennifer Zetlan

Beylke - (To be announced)

Khave - Heather Johnson

Arontshik - Ryan Lustgarten

InsightALT events were created to give the public an intimate, insiders look behind the scenes of American Lyric Theater’s process of creating new operas. Each event features a concert reading of a new opera in development at ALT, featuring guest singers from the world's leading opera houses, followed an interactive discussion between the audience and the writers behind each work. These conversations, moderated by ALT's founder, Lawrence Edelson, use Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process to engage with those experiencing the opera for the first time to help the writers on their journeys.

American Lyric Theater’s programs are made possible by generous lead funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Howard Gilman Foundation, The Dubose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund, he Amphion Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University; and the support of many individual donors.

Host or Publisher American Lyric Theater