Hastings’ Prologue Opera offers Becoming Tosca

Performances will be at St John’s Evangelist, St Leonards On Sea on July 2; Battle Abbey on July 9; and the Stables Theatre, Hastings, on July 23-24, with tickets available at prologueopera.com – all part of company’s mission to widen the accessibility of opera, just as the company’s name suggests.

Prologue Opera was founded by Hastings resident and professional opera singer Anthony Flaum, who has sung principal roles for some of the UK’s leading opera companies. It was born out of the realisation that opera needed to do more to draw people in.

“I set it up in 2021 on the principles of fair pay and using local talent and quality talent and making sure that opera had less of a mystique and was just more accessible. I wanted people to realise that opera could provide a good night out. People talk about a good night out and they think of the pub but I want people to think of the opera as being one of the possibles.

“Opera is absolutely central to people's lives in Italy where growing up you hear it all the time and in Germany there are so many more opera houses than we've got over here. In this country opera has acquired a reputation as being something for the people that can afford it or for the people who can understand a foreign language or for people that have a tuxedo. The fact is that you can go to opera in jeans and a T-shirt. It's partly a cultural thing and partly it's the industry's fault for not making it more normalised like other forms of entertainment.

"With this company, we take the approach that we want to give people a longer relationship with the characters in opera just as we are doing with Tosca. What we do is create the backstory.”

Hence the title Prologue Opera: “We create those backstories, we create new music and new dialogue and we also use pre-existing music, and it just gradually leads people into the main story of the opera. People get a longer understanding of who these people are and what the opera is about.

“My tagline is that everybody has a prologue and that everybody has a backstory whether that's good influences or bad influences. It all goes into who you are, and when you understand that then ultimately it makes it all more accessible.

“In Becoming Tosca we have commissioned a wonderful local composer who has written music for the first 25 minutes and the director has provided a translation. What happens is that we gradually lead the audience through the new music and then intersperse it with sections of Puccini's original and then the second-half is all Puccini interspersed with dialogue. Becoming Tosca will bring an evening of revolution, romance and tragedy, combining newly composed music with a tango flavour and an abridged version of Puccini’s score.”

Many of the cast and crew are East Sussex residents, including operatic tenor Anthony Flaum, composer Frank Moon, designer Viva Halton Wright, stage manager Jane Richardson and lighting designers James Dean and Jonathan Richardson. In addition, cast member Harry Gentry is a new talent from the White Rock Youth Theatre and will be playing the young revolutionary Angelotti.

Cast list: Tosca – Anna Sideris; Scarpia – Brendan Collins; Cavaradossi – Anthony Flaum; Spoletta – Jonathan Cooke; Angelotti – Harry Gentry; director, script and translation – Christopher Cowell; designer – Viva Halton Wright; stage management – Jane Richardson; Lighting Designers James Dean and Jon Richardson; and composer Frank Moon. Lesley Anne Sammons is Musical Director; Boyan Ivanov (clarinets). Supported by the Hinrichsen Foundation and the Isabel Blackman Foundation.