The Cinnabar Theater, located in Petaluma, California, is a professional non-profit theater producing opera and musical theatre, drama and a chamber music series under the auspices of the Cinnabar Arts Corporation. The venue is also home to the Young Repertory Theater (founded in 1983), the longest running and largest youth performing arts program in Sonoma County. [1]
The theater, a 1908 schoolhouse, was purchased by Marvin Klebe (1935–1999) and his wife and love Jan Klebe in 1970 as a venue to produce opera and musical theater. The Klebes converted it into a theater with much family and community help including the talents of Marvin's San Francisco Opera Company colleague, soprano Sylvia Davis (1937-).
Cinnabar Theater opened in 1972. [2]
Marvin Klebe was an operatic baritone who appeared in three roles with the San Francisco Opera's Spring Opera Theater during the 1963 and 1967 seasons and in the U.S. premiere of Gunther Schuller's The Visitation in 1967 at the War Memorial Opera House. [3]
In 1986, Nina Shuman (1954–2010) joined the company as Music Director and Conductor. The daughter of Juilliard trombone professor Davis Shuman (who commissioned and premiered works by Ernest Bloch, Vincent Persichetti, Darius Milhaud, Tibor Serly, and Henry Cowell in addition to playing principal trombone with the American Symphony Orchestra), [4] Shuman had studied conducting with Murry Sidlin at the Aspen Music Festival. She led the Cinnabar Opera Theater in over thirty-five opera productions, including the 2010 West Coast premiere of Tobias Picker's Emmeline in addition to conducting productions for Lamplighters Music Theatre, Boise Opera and as Music Director of the Harrower Summer Opera Workshop at the University of Georgia. [5]
In 1988, Shuman and Klebe created the Petaluma Summer Music Festival as part of the Cinnabar Arts Corporation, in addition to developing the Cinnabar Chamber Singers and the Cinnabar Choral Ensemble. The theater has also served as a home for dancer/choreographer Ann Woodhead's Mercury Moving Company and the experimental Quicksilver Theater Company under the leadership of Richard Blake. [6]
Their former conductor, Mary Chun (who also serves as conductor of San Francisco's new music ensemble Earplay), has led performances for Hawaii Opera Theatre and served on the conducting staffs of San Francisco Opera, the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, The Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Belgium's La Monnaie, the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris and the Opéra de Lyon, where she was also the Director of Musical Studies for Music Director Kent Nagano. [7] [8] She has conducted Cinnabar productions of She Loves Me (2011), Don Giovanni (2012), Carmen (2013), The Marriage of Figaro (2014), and others. [9]
Notable among the many dramatic works produced at Cinnabar was a 2004 production of Tony Kushner's The Illusion (1988) adapted from L’Illusion Comique by 17th-century French playwright Pierre Corneille. [10] The Cinnabar production featured actor Jeffrey Weissman. In 2013, Broadway veteran and film/television actor Charles Siebert played the role of Gregory Solomon in the Cinnabar production of Arthur Miller's The Price. [11] [12]
In 2024, Cinnabar Theater announced plans to build a new venue located at the Petaluma Village Premium Outlet Mall. While the theater is in construction, Cinnabar will be performing their 2024/25 season at Sonoma State University.
Petaluma is a city in Sonoma County, California, located in the North Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area. Its population was 59,776 according to the 2020 census.
Santa Rosa is a city in and the county seat of Sonoma County, in the North Bay region of the Bay Area in California. Its population as of the 2020 census was 178,127. It is the largest city in California's Wine Country and Redwood Coast. It is the fifth most populous city in the Bay Area after San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, and Fremont; and the 25th-most populous city in California.
The Phoenix Theater is an all-ages nightclub located in Petaluma, California. The club has been in existence since 1905 and has changed in both structure and purpose, mostly due to severe damage caused by several fires.
Sir Jeffrey Philip Tate was an English conductor of classical music. Tate was born with spina bifida and had an associated spinal curvature. After studying medicine at the University of Cambridge and beginning a medical career in London, he switched to music and worked under Georg Solti at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, before making his conducting debut in 1979 at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. He held conducting appointments with the English Chamber Orchestra, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, among others, and was the first person to be appointed principal conductor of the Royal Opera House. He was knighted for his services to music in 2017.
Donato Cabrera is an American conductor with an active international career. He is the Artistic and Music Director of the California Symphony, and was the Resident Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony and Wattis Foundation Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra from 2009-2016.
For the radio series, see Earplay.
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Union Avenue Opera is an opera company based in St. Louis, Missouri. The company was founded in 1994 by Scott Schoonover, the music director of Union Avenue Christian Church, which serves as the company's venue in St. Louis' Visitation Park neighborhood.
Emmeline is an opera in two acts composed by American Tobias Picker with a libretto by J. D. McClatchy. Picker's first opera, it was commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera company and premiered in 1996. Based on Judith Rossner's novel of the same name, Emmeline is an American retelling of the Oedipus myth from the mother’s viewpoint.
Laura Elise Schwendinger was the first composer to win the American Academy in Berlin's Berlin Prize.
Nimrod David Pfeffer is an Israeli-American conductor and pianist.
Mildred Miller Posvar was an American classical mezzo-soprano who had a major career performing in operas, concerts, and recitals during the mid twentieth century. She was notably a principal artist at the Metropolitan Opera from 1951 through 1974. In 1978 she founded the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, serving as the company's Artistic Director through 1999.
James Maddalena is an American baritone who is chiefly associated with contemporary American opera. He gained international recognition in 1987 when he originated the role of Richard Nixon at the premiere of John Adams's opera Nixon in China at Houston. He has since reprised the role on many occasions, and recorded it for the Nonesuch Records release of the opera in 1987. In addition to Maddelena's role as Nixon, he has originated two other Adams characters: the Captain in The Death of Klinghoffer and Jack Hubbard in Doctor Atomic. He has also performed roles in the premieres of operas by Paul Moravec and Stewart Wallace among other American composers.
Kurt Horres was a German stage director, particularly of opera, and opera manager. He held positions as general manager at the Staatstheater Darmstadt, the Hamburg State Opera, and from 1986 to 1996 at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein. He focused on opera of the 20th century, including composers who had been banned during the Nazi regime, such as Korngold's Die tote Stadt, and literature operas including Gottfried von Einem's Kabale und Liebe, and the world premieres of Blacher's Yvonne, Prinzessin von Burgund, and Klebe's Das Mädchen aus Domrémy. He taught stage direction at the Folkwang University.
Dezi Gallegos is a playwright based in Los Angeles, California, who currently works at Proximity Media.
Mary Chun is an American conductor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is Music Director of the Cinnabar Theater and has been the conductor of Earplay since 2000.
Ann Moss is an American operatic soprano. She is best known for her commitment to contemporary music, having premiered and recorded works by many living composers including Vartan Aghababian, Nancy Bachmann, Weslie Brown, David Conte, Kenneth Froelich, Keiko Fujiie, Heather Gilligan, Jake Heggie, Miriam Miller, Miya Masaoka, Kirk O'Riordan, Wayne Peterson, Eric Sawyer, Allen Shearer, Tony Solitro, John Thow and Liam Wade, among others.
Mystic Theatre, also known as McNear's Mystic Theatre, is a historic building and music venue built in 1911, and located in Petaluma, California. The McNear's Saloon and Dining House is housed next door in an adjoined building.