Seance on a Wet Afternoon to Premiere at the Granada

Stephen Schwartz’s Seance on a Wet Afternoon, at once an unprecedented surprise and a long-anticipated goal of the Santa Barbara music community, comes to the Granada Theatre on Saturday, September 26, as the highest-profile world premiere in recent Santa Barbara history. It’s the first opera by Grammy-winning Broadway and film composer Stephen Schwartz, it has an amazing cast, and it brings together an underrated classic film property with the vision of an S.B. couple, Richard and Luci Janssen, who have become among the world’s most influential commissioners of contemporary classical music. The top two tiers of tickets are already sold out for Saturday night, but there are still affordable options for those interested in witnessing music history.

Although he tasted success early in his career with Godspell, for which he won two Grammys in 1971, Stephen Schwartz has persisted in pushing the limits of his art with ambitious projects in a number of media. Together with legendary choreographer Bob Fosse, he advanced the art form of the Broadway musical by writing Pippin, which has gone on to be one of the world’s most beloved and frequently produced shows. In the 1990s, Schwartz joined the team at Disney and wrote a string of hits for the studio’s animated films, such as Pocahontas. In 1995, Schwartz demonstrated his uncanny eye for dramatic potential by optioning Gregory Maguire’s novel Wicked, and then teaming with Winnie Holzman to transform the story of the witches of Oz into the most popular and influential musical thus far this century. Schwartz’s music for Wicked has fascinated students of musical theater and thrilled audiences all over the world. Deftly blending techniques of film scoring with the traditional elements of stage musical construction, Schwartz created a seamless musical world for his characters and indicated that his abilities as a composer were on the verge of another great leap forward.

With Seance, Schwartz takes that leap. In a completely operatic idiom (i.e., no amplification of the instruments or voices), Schwartz has managed to both preserve the excitement and suspense of the original film and extend its concept into the realm of the opera canon. With soprano Lauren Flanigan in the lead role, the cast will be extraordinary, both as singers and as actors. Scott Schwartz, Stephen’s son and a successful theater director in his own right, has come in to direct, and longtime Opera Santa Barbara Maestro Valery Ryvkin will conduct.