If you’re a musical theater composer, Broadway might get you a Tony Award — but it won’t get you 50 voices singing onstage. For that kind of scale, Jeanine Tesori, the Tony-winning composer of “Kimberly Akimbo” and “Fun Home,” turns to opera: Her latest, “Grounded,” has an orchestra of 80 and a cast of 60.
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Listen to this week’s “ Stagecraft ” podcast below:
Based on the 2014 play that starred Anne Hathaway in a 2015 Off Broadway run , “Grounded” marks Tesori’s Metropolitan Opera debut in a production directed by another theater-world crossover, Michael Mayer (“A Beautiful Noise,” the upcoming “Swept Away”). “When you have an orchestra of 80 people, just the string section alone is unlike anything,” Tesori said on the latest episode of “Stagecraft,” Variety’s theater podcast. “The response that I have hearing it… I’m so moved by it, just the sheer number of people that you can’t get anywhere else.”
“Grounded,” written by Tesori and playwright-librettist George Brandt, follows a hotshot female pilot who gets reassigned to operate combat drones used in wartime maneuvers half a world away. That military setting, Tesori said, was one of the factors that suggested to her that “Grounded” was more of an opera than a musical.
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“The military world is so filled with rhythm and cadence,” she explained. “In the drum call, the cadence is about keeping people literally together and all doing the same thing at the same time, which to me is about choral work. It’s just a completely sung-through world. Plus, there’s such an epic nature to this story of a woman and her hunger for protecting the country, and the way that patriotism works, and the way that it’s used to work against us.”
Also on the new Stagecraft, Tesori discussed the national tour of the Tony-winning “Kimberly Akimbo,” launching later this month, and the new version of the musical she co-wrote with David Henry Hwang, “Soft Power,” now playing at the D.C. area’s Signature Theatre in a revised version streamlined down to 90 minutes.
She also described her efforts to get as many theater people as she can to Lincoln Center to see “Grounded” at one of the most famous opera houses in the world. “A lot of people in my [theater] world have said, ‘Where is the Met?’ And I think: ‘Where is the Met?! I mean, do you see the giant fountain? It’s right behind that!'”
To hear the entire conversation, listen at the link above or download and subscribe to “Stagecraft” on podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts , Spotify and the Broadway Podcast Network . New episodes of “Stagecraft” are released every other week.
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