Courtney Love Is Now an Opera Singer
Instead of finishing her memoir, Courtney Love has discovered a new pastime: Opera singing. The Hole singer has been cast as one of the lead roles in the upcoming pop opera Kansas City Choir Boy, which will run 10 performances during New York’s Prototype: Opera/Theater/Now Festival from January 8th to 17th.
Love seems to have fully embraced the role of opera diva. “I love the concept, and I’m loving the music,” Love said of the show. “I’m playing it constantly. I’m looking to do things that are different. I just finished a rock tour of Australia, and it was great, but I’ve been doing that for a long time. I wanted to do something challenging.”
Composer Todd Almond created the music for the opera and talked to the New York Times about his surprise casting of Love in the lead role. “I’ve always been fascinated with her,” Almond told the Times‘ ArtsBeat. “I love her voice, and I think she’s a great actress. And I thought she would find the character interesting.” Almond will also play the male lead in Kansas City Choir Boy, which is described as “a theatricalized concept album about explosive young love tested by cruel fate, told in a series of mysterious flashbacks” on the show’s Prototype listing. (At press time, Love isn’t mentioned anywhere on the Kansas City Choir Boy listing, where it says the opera is performed simply by “Todd Almond and Ensemble.”)
Anyone hoping to witness Love hit some glass-shattering notes should be warned, however, that Almond says his hour-long show more closely mirrors a concept album than an actual opera. “When I say ‘opera,’ I don’t mean it’s in an operatic style,” Almond said. “I mean it in the sense that it’s a group of songs that tell a story. I write musicals, I write plays and I write what I call opera.” So future performances of The Marriage of Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera aren’t likely in Love’s future (but a Hole reunion might be).