LA Opera

The evil stepsisters (Ronnita Nicole Miller, Stacey Tappan) flank their evil father (Alessandro Corbelli)

L.A. Opera's current production of Rossini's La Cenerentola (aka Cinderella) has no glass slippers, no coach that turns into a pumpkin, no evil stepmother and absolutely no bippity boppity boo.

But it is a fun visual feast, a comic opera in cartoon colors, thanks largely to the work of set and costume designer Joan Guillén. Guillén, who has taught set design in Barcelona for 40 years, makes his L.A. Opera debut with La Cenerentola, which opened to a sold-out house at the Dorothy Chandler on March 23.

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Josh Shaw / Pacific Opera Project

Pacific Opera Project's Sweeney Todd,

Centuries ago, opera was more affordable, not just something thought to be for the country club set when the dained to put on their long silk gloves and gold-rimmed glasses.

Several companies in Los Angeles have strived to recreate this custom, but it hasn't always been easy. Ticket prices are one thing (dozens of singers in fancy costumes can't always come cheap), but there's also getting the public to commit the time.

"They're generally going to be at least three hours of your life, just sitting there," says Josh Shaw, artistic director of Pacific Opera Project, which was founded in July 2011. "They're from a different era, so if you don't really make them entertaining from start to finish... [Plus, in L.A.], we're competing [with] 400 other events that night."

From cutting scenes and modernizing settings to creative locales and fudging the definition of "opera," here's how some local companies are offering operatic splendor at bargain-basement prices.

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Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Starus, In Mourning and In Rage (1977/2012)

Courtesy of the artists

This week, an opera singer gone brilliantly rogue performs downtown, a celebrated curator who's something of a crusader visits the Miracle Mile and more group shows round out the list.

5. The curator who keeps going and going
Hans Ulrich Obrist makes "being a curator like a spiritual vocation," says poet Eileen Myles, who worked with him in the '90s. Obrist, who started out by curating a show in his kitchen, now directs London's Serpentine Gallery and has been near the top of ArtReview's "Power 100" list for the past few years. His sustained influence has a lot to do with his ability to say a lot and still sound smart and seemingly be everywhere at once. This week, he's here, talking to L.A. artist John Baldessari at LACMA and, at ForYourArt, to inventor Danny Hillis, who co-engineered the Clock of the Long Now, which should keep time for the next 10,000 years. 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Sun., July 29, 3 p.m. (323) 857-6010, lacma.org. 6020 Wilshire Blvd.; Mon., 7 p.m. foryourart.com.

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Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

Andreas Mitisek is sitting in the Long Beach Opera's modest church-rental office near the southern terminus of the 710 freeway, days after wrapping the first performances of the current season.

"It all started with the opera in a parking garage," says Mitisek, the company's Austrian-born artistic and general director, in his thick, Schwarzenegger-esque accent. That's when Long Beach's oldest professional opera company abandoned a traditional performance space for a 2007 production of Grigori Frid's one-woman opera The Diary of Anne Frank.

The phrase "opera in a parking garage" casually rolls off his tongue, as if it were perfectly natural for the art form to be presented in a ghostly concrete structure meant to store cars.

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Bill Raden

Opera experimentalist Yuval Sharon

A funny thing happened to Yuval Sharon on his way to a planned career as a film director. While studying at UC Berkeley, he decided to go to the opera. The production was Wozzeck by Alban Berg. To prepare, he listened to a recording at home and found his imagination fired by Berg's searing, atonal chromatic expressionism. Image after powerful image assailed him as he imagined the staging and what the performance would feel like sitting in the audience. Then he went to the opera house. Compared to his vision, the production seemed boring and bloodless, dispiritingly conventional.

The evening was an epiphany. Certainly such works deserved a better theatrical treatment than this. And he was just the man to do it.

Fast-forward to a recent, overcast morning at the Atwater Crossing complex, where Sharon stands in a raw warehouse he's transforming into the kind of opera house he imagined years before at Berkeley. It's no Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Crisscrossed by wooden ramps and dominated by seven towering, sculptural set pieces, it looks more like an art installation at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA.

In fact, it is the stage for the new experimental opera Sharon is directing as the inaugural production of the Industry, the avant opera company he formed this year with his partner, producer Laura Kay Swanson. Now in the final stretch of rehearsals, the production will be a world premiere of composer Anne LeBaron and librettist Douglas Kearney's Crescent City, which Sharon fell in love with when he was programming New York Opera's acclaimed new-works showcase VOX.

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Shannon Cottrell

For more photos check out our slideshow, Sage Vaughn: Studio Tour

Sage Vaughn, one of SoCal's favorite contemporary urban naturalist painters, is tucked inside a quaint and tidy mid century modern one story studio, located right where Pasadena ends. There's a small group of mourning doves that gather daily outside his door waiting for seeds, unnervingly oblivious to the occasional hawk overhead. Prime death watch viewing if he's not busy researching other concepts of animal behavior, whether it's a Wagner opera or in an inherited collection of vintage Hustler magazines.

This particular morning, upon LA Weekly's arrival, we find red velvet cupcakes and a mean cup of joe complete with hand frothed milk waiting for us. Not a typical artist interview welcome, but our man Sage is anything but typical -- evidenced by the ski mask he always wears tucked in his back pocket.

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Star Foreman

Damien Elwood, left, with Angie Engelbart, front, and Shabnam Kalbasi

"All you really need to know about Carmen is, one, she's a Gypsy. And two, she's a slut," the singer says before beginning.

It's standing room only at the bar, where a staging of the French opera is taking place. Yes, that's right. Opera. At a bar. Specifically, the Room 5 Lounge atop a restaurant on Beverly Boulevard.

The Bizet with booze comes to Los Angeles -- by way of Brooklyn -- courtesy of the grassroots program Opera on Tap, which aims to bring to the masses the world's snootiest art form.

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