Eau Claire High School & SC Philharmonic Present Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld

Collaboration Yields Second Year of Opera at Eau Claire

The Eau Claire High School Department of Fine Arts, with members of The South Carolina Philharmonic, will present Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld Tuesday, March 14 and Wednesday, March 15 at 7:30 PM. The production will be held at Cottingham Theatre on the campus of Columbia College. Tickets are $5.00 at the door.

Directed by Eau Claire theatre instructor, Jerry Stevenson, and with musical direction by Eau Claire Artist-in-Residence and SC Philharmonic conductor, Nicholas Smith, the operetta features more than 30 Eau Claire High School music, dance and theatre students. Re-conceived and set among the Skid Row underground, the operetta follows Orpheus to Mount Olympus and subsequently to Hades in search of his wife Eurydice, who’s been spirited away by Pluto disguised as a mild-mannered shepherd. Probably most famous for it’s Act III Gallop, better known as the Can-Can, the show ends in a rollicking barroom extravaganza featuring members of the Eau Claire High School Dance Department under the direction of dance instructor Barbara-Howse-Diemer.

"Offenbach’s comic opera," says Stevenson, "is ideal for these student performers in that it explores issues of friendship, relationships, and mis-matched lovers. At one point, Jupiter even remarks, ‘is this Mount Olympus or the Jerry Springer Show!’" Originally developed as a partnership to expose high school students to the world of opera on a practical level, the project’s success from last year’s production of The Mikado garnered such student and audience response that the collaboration was extended.

According to Maestro Smith, "Eau Claire is really leading the way amongst high schools in making opera an educational priority. The discipline of learning something unfamiliar, memorizing it, and then doing curious things on stage while you sing it, is so bizarre a concept that it must surely have huge benefits to every student involved."

Orpheus in the Underworld runs approximately an hour and a half with a 15-minute intermission. For more information, please contact the Richland One Office of Communications at 231-7510 or 231-7504.