FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Great Barrington, Mass.—The Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center and Berkshire Opera Festival (BOF) are delighted to announce that the Mahaiwe is BOF’s new long-term home, through a multi-year residency.
The Mahaiwe will present BOF’s mainstage production and other programming for the coming years, beginning with Gounod’s Faust this August 24, 27, and 30. The theater will also host a free preview of Faust with BOF’s co-founders Jonathon Loy and Brian Garman on July 24 at 4 p.m.
The organizations identified a shared aspiration to bring world-class performing arts to our rural region — and an existing overlapping audience — and formalized that connection through this multi-year commitment.
Both companies now look towards long-term collaboration as well as ways the Mahaiwe’s venue and final-mile production expertise and BOF’s artistic reach can be married to provide more content for audiences of all ages.
“I’m truly excited to enter into this partnership with our friends at the Mahaiwe, and particularly eager to explore the possibilities this presents to expand our programming — staged productions, recitals, educational offerings, and more — which has long been a goal of ours,” says BOF Artistic Director and Co-Founder Brian Garman. “It allows us to broaden our presence in the community, provide greater opportunities for our singers and orchestral musicians, and most of all, to present more of the high-quality performances our audiences have come to expect.”
“BOF has produced several of our season mainstage operas at the Mahaiwe beginning in 2019 with our production of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale,” says BOF Executive Director Abigail Rollins. “The Mahaiwe has been a reliable and dedicated partner to BOF helping us navigate a variety of challenges, such as creating an orchestra pit in a theater that doesn’t normally have one or creating artist and audience safety plans that allowed BOF to be one of the first opera companies to return to live, indoor performances following the pandemic. Each time BOF has returned to the Mahaiwe, the theater and its staff have felt more and more like home. It feels wonderful to finalize our special relationship through this residency.”
“The Mahaiwe, from its inception, has had among its objectives the intention to make opera a serious offering at its venue,” says Mahaiwe Board of Directors Chair Margaret Deutsch. “Now because of its partnering with such an esteemed and growing opera company, Berkshire Opera Festival, that desire has become reality. The relationship enhances not only the Mahaiwe and BOF, but also the Berkshire community, as this partnership can support and develop what it takes to perform world-class opera, and all at our restored historic theater in downtown Great Barrington.”
“There is a dedicated opera audience in the Berkshires, thanks in part to the vitality and excellence of the Berkshire Opera Festival, which came on the scene with a splash in 2016 and has been growing ever since,” says Mahaiwe Executive Director Janis Martinson. “The Mahaiwe knows that audience well through its screenings of the Metropolitan Opera in HD broadcast seasons going back to 2008. I am delighted that Mahaiwe patrons can now count on finding world-class Berkshire Opera Festival performances here every year.”
About Berkshire Opera Festival
Berkshire Opera Festival (BOF) is a fully-producing summer festival founded by Jonathon Loy and Brian Garman which presented its first season in 2016. The mission of Berkshire Opera Festival is to entertain and enrich the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds throughout the Berkshire region by providing accessible and affordable performances of a broad range of operas with the highest artistic standards. Each summer, BOF presents musically and dramatically compelling operatic productions, in addition to recitals and other related musical events. Recent productions include Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Puccini’s La Bohème.
About the Mahaiwe
Located in downtown Great Barrington, Mass., the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center is the year-round presenter of world-class music, dance, theater, classic films, Live in HD broadcasts, and arts education programs for the southern Berkshires and neighboring regions. The intimate jewel box of a theater opened in 1905. Since 2005, the performing arts center has hosted over 1,500 events and welcomed over half a million people through its doors. More than 26,000 students from 75 different schools have benefited from the Mahaiwe’s school-time performances and residencies. For more information, see mahaiwe.org.
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