San Francisco Cabaret Opera
Harriet March Page, Artistic Director
Sex and the Bible: The Opera (Part I)
March 5-14, 2010
A 75-minute cabaret opera based on the Old Testament by way of Las Vegas. Mark Alburger, composer/librettist.
Click here to learn more
More About the Show
The Cast
Dates and Locations
Two Weekends
Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, March 5, 6 ,7, and 12, 13, 14,
Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm
Sunday at 7pm
Community Music Center, 544 Capp Street, San Francisco
Parking is available at the Mission-Bartlett Garage, 3255 21st Street, between Mission and Valencia.
Tickets
$25 cabaret table per person (Must be purchased in advanced.)
$15 general admission
$10 seniors, students and TBA
Reserve your tickets online by selecting one of the dates, ticket prices and click the "Add to Cart" button below ($1.50 processing fee included per ticket) or you can call 415-289-6877 or email.
More About the show
The Bible is old, but sex is older. Archbishop Ussher thought that God's creation of Adam and Eve took place on October 28, 4004 BC, but contemporary theorists such as Thomas Cavalier Smith trace the origins of sexuality back more than 850 million years. So it is no surprise that matters of the spiritual and physical -- clear commonalities of ancient and modern human experience -- often collide.
That central religious text of Judaism and Christianity, the Tanakh or Old Testament of the Bible, is rife with tales of such collisions. Even in the first Book of Genesis, scarcely a page goes by without some racy story, from the Temptation in the Garden of Eden through the attempted rape of Joseph by Potiphar's Wife.
Indeed the stories often seem so contemporary that San Francisco Cabaret Opera composer-director Mark Alburger and Artistic Director Harriet March Page have retooled these Biblical scenarios into a contemporary Sin City of strip clubs and brothels, featuring Heavenly Emcees and a cast of familiar Satanic Lounge Lizards, suspicious Godfather Patriarchs, alluring Femmes Fatales, and Trailer Trash Hangers-On.
From the Stonewall Ashes of Sodom and Gomorrah through the Action Hero wife-swapping of Jacob, other allusions are brought into the mix via Alburger's eclectic, postminimal, style-appropriating score and Page's creative vision in this premiere production featuring sextets of a mostly-female, gender- bending cast, reflecting the iconography of millennia (from Ancient Pompei through online pornography).
The 80-minute Sex in the Bible: The Opera (Part I), derived from Alburger's 8-hour+ work-in-progress The Bible, includes excerpts from
The Creation
Quartet for the Beginning of Time: Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel
Babel
Noah's Flood
Abraham and Isaac (Lot in Life)
Israel in Trouble
Amazing Joseph
and features those verses-you-rarely-hear-in-synagogues-churches-and-mosques, including The Nakedness of Noah, Abraham passing off his wife as his sister to interested royal suitors (twice! -- and Isaac doing the same, to boot), Lot's incestuous liaisons with his daughters, The Rape of Dinah, Onan's coitus interruptus, and Judah's accidental impregnation of his daughter-in-law-turned-prostitute.
Alburger's work is troped (after medieval musical practices) on F.J. Haydn's Creation; Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time; Igor Stravinsky's Babel, The Flood, and Abraham and Isaac; Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde; Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 15, Op. 28; G.F. Handel's Israel in Egypt; and Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
A 75-minute cabaret opera based on the Old Testament by way of Las Vegas. Mark Alburger, composer/librettist.
Click here to learn more
More About the Show
The Cast
Dates and Locations
Two Weekends
Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, March 5, 6 ,7, and 12, 13, 14,
Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm
Sunday at 7pm
Community Music Center, 544 Capp Street, San Francisco
Parking is available at the Mission-Bartlett Garage, 3255 21st Street, between Mission and Valencia.
Tickets
$25 cabaret table per person (Must be purchased in advanced.)
$15 general admission
$10 seniors, students and TBA
Reserve your tickets online by selecting one of the dates, ticket prices and click the "Add to Cart" button below ($1.50 processing fee included per ticket) or you can call 415-289-6877 or email.
More About the show
The Bible is old, but sex is older. Archbishop Ussher thought that God's creation of Adam and Eve took place on October 28, 4004 BC, but contemporary theorists such as Thomas Cavalier Smith trace the origins of sexuality back more than 850 million years. So it is no surprise that matters of the spiritual and physical -- clear commonalities of ancient and modern human experience -- often collide.
That central religious text of Judaism and Christianity, the Tanakh or Old Testament of the Bible, is rife with tales of such collisions. Even in the first Book of Genesis, scarcely a page goes by without some racy story, from the Temptation in the Garden of Eden through the attempted rape of Joseph by Potiphar's Wife.
Indeed the stories often seem so contemporary that San Francisco Cabaret Opera composer-director Mark Alburger and Artistic Director Harriet March Page have retooled these Biblical scenarios into a contemporary Sin City of strip clubs and brothels, featuring Heavenly Emcees and a cast of familiar Satanic Lounge Lizards, suspicious Godfather Patriarchs, alluring Femmes Fatales, and Trailer Trash Hangers-On.
From the Stonewall Ashes of Sodom and Gomorrah through the Action Hero wife-swapping of Jacob, other allusions are brought into the mix via Alburger's eclectic, postminimal, style-appropriating score and Page's creative vision in this premiere production featuring sextets of a mostly-female, gender- bending cast, reflecting the iconography of millennia (from Ancient Pompei through online pornography).
The 80-minute Sex in the Bible: The Opera (Part I), derived from Alburger's 8-hour+ work-in-progress The Bible, includes excerpts from
The Creation
Quartet for the Beginning of Time: Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel
Babel
Noah's Flood
Abraham and Isaac (Lot in Life)
Israel in Trouble
Amazing Joseph
and features those verses-you-rarely-hear-in-synagogues-churches-and-mosques, including The Nakedness of Noah, Abraham passing off his wife as his sister to interested royal suitors (twice! -- and Isaac doing the same, to boot), Lot's incestuous liaisons with his daughters, The Rape of Dinah, Onan's coitus interruptus, and Judah's accidental impregnation of his daughter-in-law-turned-prostitute.
Alburger's work is troped (after medieval musical practices) on F.J. Haydn's Creation; Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time; Igor Stravinsky's Babel, The Flood, and Abraham and Isaac; Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde; Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 15, Op. 28; G.F. Handel's Israel in Egypt; and Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.