Gotham Chamber Opera presents Alexandre bis & Comedy on the Bridge

Gotham Chamber Opera, in collaboration with the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, presents a double bill of Alexandre bis & Comedy on the Bridge, both by Bohuslav Martinů, from October 14 – 18, 2014 at Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, 524 W. 59th Street NYC. Performances: Opening Night gala on Tuesday at 7:30pm; Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 7:30pm. Tickets are $30-$175 and are available online at www.ticketcentral.com, by phone at (212) 279-4200, or in person at 416 W. 42nd Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues) in the lobby of Playwrights Horizons.

Alexandre bis & Comedy on the Bridge features music by Bohuslav Martinů with Neal Goren, conductor; James Marvel, stage director; Cameron Anderson, set designer; Fabio Toblini, costume designer; and Clifton Taylor, lighting designer.

A bridge to nowhere. A singing painting. An intermittent beard. Take a dip into the 20th-century absurd as Gotham Chamber Opera begins its 13th season with a double-bill of short comic operas by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů. Alexandre bis (Alexander twice) is a surrealist comedy about a man who decides to test his wife’s fidelity by shaving off his beard and posing as his own cousin from San Francisco. She recognizes him but falls in love anyway. Martinů’s answer to Mozart’s Così fan tutte observes the conventions of comic opera while tweaking them, thus proving that a composer, if not a husband, can have it both ways. Comedy on the Bridge tells the story of two rival principalities separated by a river. A woman returning from one side gets caught in the middle by a bureaucratic snafu; soon she’s joined in this absurdist limbo by a letch, a fiancé, a vengeful wife, and a schoolmaster with a riddle. Everyone has a secret, but no one has a clue – except the composer, who gets them all happily sorted by the end. Featuring Jenna Siladie, Abigail Fischer, Cassandra Zoé Velasco, Jason Slayden, Jarrett Ott, Joseph Beutel.

Gotham Chamber Opera previously presented a Martinů double-bill of Les larmes du couteau and Hlas lesa in 2003, a hit with the press and the public, resulting in lines around the block for returned tickets.