LEO DOULTON

The Perfect Opera is a very silly show. If you just want to come and enjoy a hiphop foxtrot operatic sketch comedy show, we'd love to have you there.

But some of our friends are really pretentious. So to them we'd like to say that we have three main aims in creating The Perfect Opera:

1. To restart opera’s light music tradition. Prior to World War Two, composers drew happily on popular music to create comic operas with mass appeal. After the tragedies of the war, opera focused on the darker side of humanity, leaving light music to musical theatre and television. We believe it is time that opera turned back to popular music and comedy. The Perfect Opera suggests a new way to do so.
    

2. To make an accessible new opera. New opera is often seen as elitist and incomprehensible. We believe that it can be made more accessible to the general public if it is in a lighthearted musical and textual language that the public already understand and enjoy. Therefore, The Perfect Opera is an English-language entertainment combining the best of opera and contemporary popular music.
    

3. To help the development of our young artists artistically and professionally. Virtually Opera is committed to developing opera as an artform, and helping artists to develop professionally, in a way that enables them to explore new avenues in opera. Our classically-trained singers will have a rare chance to explore the world between popular entertainment and opera, and try new techniques and styles.

We believe that developing accessibility and demonstrating the results of our work at the Edinburgh Festival will allow us to reach a large number of other contemporary music practitioners, and give both comedy and opera fans a great show. It’s a new kind of English-language entertainment combining the best of contemporary opera, popular music, and comedy for the Fringe.