Breaking: Covent Garden to reopen on May 17

Just in from the ROH:

The Royal Opera House is excited to announce that it will once again open its doors to audiences on 17 May 2021, with a packed schedule of in-person performances from both The Royal Ballet and The Royal Opera, brand new work available to stream online, and the world’s first opera in hyper-reality.

Alex Beard, Chief Executive of the Royal Opera House, said:

“It is incredibly exciting that we will soon be opening our doors and welcoming audiences back to our beautiful Covent Garden home. We can’t wait to bring life back to our stages and the joy of live performance back to our audiences, and I am delighted that we can go back to doing what we do best: performing the world’s best ballet and opera to audiences at home and around the globe.”

The ROH also announces the re-opening of the world’s first opera in hyper reality: Current, Rising, a unique collaboration between the Royal Opera House’s innovation programme, Audience Labs, award-winning Figment Productions and Royal Holloway, University of London. Developed by a female-led creative team, the 15-minute hyper-reality opera experience combines virtual reality with a multisensory set, inviting audiences to step into a bespoke ‘Opera Tardis’ and experience a dream-like journey carried musically by a poem layered in song.

Before booking opens for these exciting works on 13 April, The Royal Opera is delighted to reveal that on Friday 9 April it will be live streaming its first fully staged production since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic with a brand-new double bill of Bertolt Brecht’s and Kurt Weill’s, The Seven Deadly Sins and Mahagonny Songspiel. Directed by British director Isabelle Kettle, soloists of the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme will perform Weill’s satirical double bill under the baton of British-Cypriot conductor Michael Papadopoulos and with choreography from Julia Cheng. This production will be available to online audiences only.