The University of Arizona will earn a footnote to the Welsh comic opera “Rhondda Rips it Up!”
This weekend, UA Opera Theatre will perform the American premiere of the piece that was commissioned in 2018 by the Welsh National Opera to commemorate the centennial of English women winning the right to vote.
The Tucson performance, directed by Cynthia Stokes, also will commemorate the centennial of the American suffrage movement that led to the 19th Amendment that gave American women voting rights.
“Rhondda Rips it Up!” follows the true story of Margaret Haig Thomas, the Viscountess Rhondda, and the militant members of The Women’s Social and Political Union, more commonly known as Suffragettes. But it does it with snarky wit and belly-laugh humor that sometimes borders on slapstick and often finds men at the butt of its jokes.
The humor is effective largely because it is delivered by an all-female cast — with the exception of a single male multicasting in several “service” roles — of 14 that take on the roles of some 60 characters. Stokes said the cast members, whom she said have bonded professionally and personally through the experience, have multiple roles and change characters sometimes with the subtlety of adding a top hat or cane or some other minor costume or prop tweak.
“It’s been such an incredible opportunity to watch this cast come together not just as singers but as colleagues and to realize how much they have in common,” she said. “It’s been a very powerful and joyful experience to work with these women.”
Behind the humor, though, is an important message and one that resonates today, said Stokes, who first learned of the opera from PBS and reached out to the composer Elena Langer about doing the American premiere at the UA.
“Whether you identify as a feminist or whatever, I think the work the suffragist movement is pretty profound,” she said.
This is the first time in UA Opera history that it has mounted an opera written by a woman and it follows last year’s history-making first time the school had performed a Spanish-language opera, that one featuring a female conductor at the podium.
