Company Spotlight: Little Opera by / Nirmala Nataraj

Erin Bregman’s background as a playwright and teaching artist for the San Francisco Opera’s ARIA program was a natural fit for her dream of creating a theatre company to guide children ages 6 through 10 through conceptualizing, writing and staging their own mini-opera from the ground up. With the world premiere of its first opera already under its belt (“Creatures of the Night,” a 10-minute piece that delighted audiences in March), Little Opera is a young ingénue’s dream.

Little Opera offers a six-month-long curriculum, developed by Bregman and recent Berkeley High graduate and actor Alona Bach, that provides the kind of across-the-board education (including costumes, set design, storytelling, dance and composition) that most incipient theatre companies lack the resources to offer artists-in-training. In its first season, nine students met for two 90-minute sessions each week. Master classes were taught by local artists from directors Jon Tracy and Matthew Graham Smith to actors Anna Bullard and Elena Wright.

Despite kids being in class only three hours a week, the six months involve a fairly extensive amount of training and mentorship, but the actual creative process is intended to be organic. It starts out small and simple, and the kids “don’t know what they’re doing until we get pretty far into it,” says Bregman. “They don’t see the entire picture until the end.” The idea is that the monumental undertaking be perceived as a vehicle for play that is fun and engaging, enabling a give-and-take relationship between adults and children.

The first session begins with brainstorming about stories, and details emerge incrementally. For “Creatures of the Night,” an “in the woods” theme led to playful explorations envisioning the creatures that lived in the woods.

“The teachers led the expedition in most ways, but things such as deciding to have a good forest and an evil forest, and to include disparate elements such as a crocodile and a goblin, came from all the ‘aha’ moments the kids had,” says Bregman. When composer Brian Rosen came aboard, he asked kids to listen and respond to the music.

While most people associate opera with operatic voices, “kids have kid voices,” Bregman says. “What sets opera apart from musical theatre, however, is that it’s entirely song and music all the way through. It makes me curious as to how larger audiences will react, since the voices are so different from what they might be accustomed to.”

Bregman’s collaboration with Bach began when the idea took root last year. “Alona was acting in a play that I wrote, right around the time I was contemplating whether Little Opera would become a reality or not,” Bregman explains. Because Bach was taking a year off before heading to college on the East Coast, the collaboration was timely and launched another idea that will be integral to Little Opera: apprenticeships for young would-be teaching artists.

Although getting Little Opera off the ground was a last-minute endeavor and “it was difficult to get the word out to people about what we were doing, now that this season has been so successful, we know we want to continue working with small groups,” says Bregman.

Little Opera has been a valuable vehicle for confidence building among the kids who’ve passed through the program so far. Bregman gives the example of a young girl who was incredibly quiet and timid in class, “to the extent that when she spoke, nobody could hear her.” The girl seldom volunteered for projects in class, but in the midst of casting, she decided she wanted to play the werewolf, which was an essential role in the opera. In a master class taught by Anna Bullard that guided the students through different situations and scenarios, the girl finally “busted out of her shell,” says Bregman. “Now we can hear her loud and clear, and she’s been volunteering for more projects and sharing her ideas with greater enthusiasm.”

Bregman’s long-term dream is that Little Opera become a seedbed for opera in San Francisco. Given the presence of ACT’s Young Conservatory, the San Francisco Ballet’s rigorous training program for boys and girls, and both a San Francisco Girls and Boys Chorus, Bregman hopes Little Opera will also develop into an intensive program for young people that will eventually be offered at the high school level. “At that point, teenagers can get professional-level experience and more specialized training that will prepare them for careers in opera and theatre.” She also hopes to widen the net of potential collaborators, given her relationships with national and international figures in opera.

“Any time you make something from nothing, it’s a satisfying experience,” Bregman notes. “I don’t remember working on something with this much thought, effort and sustained work when I was a kid. At that age, an arts experience that’s fun, invigorating and a lot of work is that much more rewarding.”


Nirmala Nataraj is an arts writer based in San Francisco.