The Honey Let’s Go Home Opera

The Honey Let’s Go Home Opera is a fantasy on flatness that takes cardboard as its muse and prime material.

 

In Honey, cardboard is bent, rolled, stapled, and vividly painted by Peter Schumann to create the precarious, exuberant costumes of the soloists, who celebrate the fact that “only flatness can save you” on a melody from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The chorus dresses in monochrome primary colors — some all red, others all blue or yellow — and operates flat cardboard puppets of the tools used to manipulate cardboard — a stapler, a pair of pliers, a box-cutter — as well as other basic cardboard objects — a goose, a bicycle, a cup and saucer.

 

Created in September 2017, Honey is the result of a collaboration between Gregory Corbino (tenor), Susie Perkins (soprano), Idith Korman (pianist, and director of New York’s Ensemble Pi), Peter Hamburger (sound-machine maker), the Bread and Puppet company, and a chorus of volunteer performers, under the direction of Peter Schumann. The Honey Let’s Go Home Opera was performed again in New York City December 14-17, 2017 at Theater for the New City. It returns to TNC by popular demand December 5-8, 2019