IN Series

IN Series reimagines ‘A Fairy Queen’ as an old-time radio program

In Artistic Director Timothy Nelson’s knowledgeable hands, the device comes off not like a gimmick but as a doorway into discovery.

‘Black Flute’ from IN Series to screen free Friday on National Mall

Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’ reconceived with Black voices central to performance and production.

IN Series sets season of live theater centering DEI

Marking its 40th year, the innovative company plans new collaborations and world premieres to play a dozen DC and Baltimore venues.

IN Series’s amusing ‘Gonzales Cantata’ musicalizes a congressional grilling

The Gonzales Cantata, a streaming production of the IN Series online program Invision, The Logan Operahouse Without Walls, is a cleverly done “docu-opera.” Composer Melissa Dunphy has taken the...

IN Series’s emotional ‘Orphée et Eurydice’ evokes loss of a loved one

Orphée et Eurydice, a streaming production of the IN Series online program Invision, The Logan Operahouse Without Walls, is a cleverly updated version of Gluck’s classic 1762 opera. It features...

IN Series’s ‘Gonzales Cantata’ tells a true story of political corruption

Just when American politics could not seem more fraught, IN Series is offering a cheeky throwback to a shockingly simpler time: a made-for-film production of Melissa Dunphy’s The Gonzales Cantata....

IN Series’s ‘Orphée et Eurydice’ strikes chord of COVID love and loss

IN Series returns to the original revolutionary opera, Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice, for an intimate film experience exploring love, loss, and grief during a global pandemic in which millions have...

IN Series digital opera season lifts off this weekend with a festival of premieres

IN Series launches its groundbreaking 2020–2021 digital opera season with a Festival Weekend of world premieres September 17 to 19, 2020. The season, characterized by genre-defying collaborations with...

IN Series to build a digital opera house without walls

If the COVID-19 pandemic has a lesson for the arts community, it’s that what’s small can still be mighty. Without a house to fill and lavish sets and costumes to maintain, Washington’s tiny itinerant...

IN Series produces first ever fully digital opera performance season

As performing arts organizations worldwide struggle to schedule live performance seasons in the midst of a global pandemic, DC’s IN Series leads the charge onto the digital stage by programming an...

Ancient mysteries astonish and delight at IN Series’ Women Composers Festival

‘Here Be Sirens’ is the phrase cartographers used for many centuries to warn sailors of marine dangers. Composer Kate Soper borrowed the name for her musically complex, theatrically rich opera, her...

IN Series’ ‘Dorothy Fields Cabaret’ honors first woman inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame

In my 20s, I lamented that despite being well-schooled in American literature, I’d ended up a failure at knowing much of our nation’s poetry by heart. But when I set out to entertain myself and a...

IN Series’ ‘Le Cabaret de Carmen’ is opera for those unafraid of art’s raw power

“I want us to be in contention for a Helen Hayes Award,” IN Series artistic director Timothy Nelson told me last fall over coffee near his office in the Shaw neighborhood. We were discussing his...

IN Series’ ‘L’Enfance du Christ’ follows the Holy Family’s journey as refugees

Hector Berlioz’s mid-19th-century L’Enfance du Christ is not quite an oratorio in the most familiar sense of that term. Nor is it quite an opera. Written piecemeal over many years by a composer who...

IN Series’ ‘L’enfance du Christ’ offers all-comers respite, transcendence, unity

How history will judge us for this administration’s treatment of Central American migrant children, I often wonder. And yet, our record of abuse against “Other” is not partisan, but has accumulated...

Exploding the canon: Inside the IN Series opera company’s “radical” practice

Now into his second year leading IN Series, the itinerant company based at the Source Theater, artistic director Timothy Nelson has not been shy about challenging opera’s status quo. “I believe that...

Dangereuse: An interview with Nigel Rowe, a cabaret star as Ariel in IN Series’ ‘Stormy Weather’

IN Series’ Stormy Weather, inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest, features the music of Billie Holiday and a stunning cabaret performance by Nigel Rowe as Ariel. In the new Sybil Williams play,...

IN Series’ ‘Stormy Weather’ provides an original take on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ with Billie Holiday as musical fuel

Ingenious. Shakespeare’s venerable, often un-provocatively produced The Tempest has been reconstructed into theater with an invigorating musical arc and an awakening narrative bite. It has been...

Review: ‘Butterfly’ by the IN Series Presents a Radical Restructuring of the Original Puccini

While considered one of the classics in opera’s storied canon, Madame Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini is simultaneously acknowledged to be one of the most problematic for its depictions of race and...

Review: ‘The Tale of Serse’ by The In Series

The In Series is a place for thought, debate, history, and innovation. With the noble goal to invigorate contemporary theatre, to create innovations in “opera and song,” to “reimagine these forms,...

Review: ‘La Paloma at the Wall’ by The In Series

The In Series at GALA Theatre has succeeded in brilliantly breathing life into a treasured zarzuela – a blend of song and dance – which was written in 1894 and originally titled La Verbena de la...

Review: ‘From U Street to the Cotton Club’ by The In Series

Rising from its roots in the Deep South, African American music journeyed north with the Great Migration, invigorating urban culture with rhythms derived from shouts to spirituals, work songs and...

Review: ‘Operetta Wonderland: The Magic of Victor Herbert’ at The In Series

It’s hard to resist the charm and humor of a good operetta. Though the form has been less popular recently, The In Series is doing its part to revive the legacy of Victor Herbert—one of the genre’s...

Review: ‘Figaro in Four Quartets’ by the In Series

From behind tall blank panels, a cast of characters drawn from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro emerge, dressed in all white period garb, staging vignettes of frustrated and consummated love punctuated...

Review: ‘Viva V.E.R.D.I. – The Promised End’ by the In Series

Theater can be many things: challenging, and then restoring; transcendent, and yet—fundamental. A platform for the cutting-edge and a welcoming home-fire for the familiar. Rarely does a single show...

Review: ‘The Emperor of Atlantis or Death Goes on Strike’ and ‘The Soldier’s Tale’ by The In Series

“In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” ― Bertolt Brecht With unsettling powers of persuasion, compelling is the watchword for patrons at...

Magic Time!: ‘The Emperor of Atlantis’ at The In Series

The Emperor of Atlantis—an operatic takedown of autocracy—is relevant to our times in freaky and haunting ways. And its backstory is chilling. Near the end of World War II, the Czech composer Victor...

Review: ‘All The Things You Are: Jerome Kern’ at The In Series

As the Great American Songbook continues to recede from its long-held prominence, productions such as the In Series All the Things You Are: Jerome Kern are priceless for those who want to hear the...

Review: ‘Jacques Brel: Songs From His World’ at Source Theatre

Time has not dimmed the impact or abundant love for the musical works of Jacques Brel; even now, nearly 40 years since his untimely death. That is apparent from the audience response and my own...

Review: The In Series: Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’ at the D.C. Scottish Rite Temple

If you’re a Mozart fan – and if you aren’t, you should be – you probably have your favorite ‘conspiracy theory’ about why the composer met his untimely death at the age of 35. Thanks to Peter...

Review: ‘Passion & Struggle’ at The In Series

Poetry can be the seed of music, and music the seed of love. Music may even be used as a form of protest—and ultimately a promoter of peace. This is evidenced by the music of composers and performers...

Review: ‘Irving Berlin: A Simple Melody. A Tribute in Song’ at The In Series

How fortunate we are to have the In Series the past 2+ decades presenting a smart set mix of: innovative Pocket Opera, intimate Cabaret, and intriguing Latino programming. [from the company’s...

Review: ‘Goyescas’ at The In Series

Tiered steps and four small café tables re-imagine the Spanish courtyard. With friendly interaction and wine, music and dancing, a cast of nine singers and two dancers introduce the evening with folk...

Review: The Romantics III: ‘Schumann & Heine’ at The In series at Source

Close your eyes for just a moment. Imagine that you are comfortably seated in an elegant, yet commodious room, filled with people who have come to share—no, not the latest election scuttlebutt; but...

Review: ‘Who’s the Boss’ at The In Series

The In Series’ production of Who’s the Boss? is a fusion of two comic operettas, Giovanni Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial By Jury, re-imagined as companion pieces though...

2016 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Do Not Disturb’

Anyone looking for a respite from this summer’s sultry heat need look no further than the stage at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, where Do Not Disturb—a cross between comic opera and bedroom...

Review: ‘Fidelio’ at The In Series

The In Series ends their season with Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, a surprisingly modern tale of faith – particularly between husband and wife. This is their biggest production ever and one of the...

Review: ‘Cosi Fan Tutte Goes Hollywood’ at The In Series

The confusion all begins with the title. Cosi Fan Tutte — It is of course the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart comic opera, or “opera buff,” that is today considered part of the gold standard of the opera...

Review: ‘Kabarett & Cabaret’ at The In Series

Like Liza Minnelli’s in Cabaret, the unforgettable image of Marlene Dietrich hovers over Kabarett & Cabaret, a production of the 2015-16 In Series at the Source Theatre. Kabarett & Cabaret: An Evening...

Review: ‘Bizet’s Carmen in Havana’ at The In Series

The In Series wows again with one of their trademark reimaginings: Carmen in Havana, which takes the essential scenes from Bizet’s classic and adds the Latin rhythms of the Caribbean with iconic Cuban...

‘Bastian & Bastiana’ at The In Series

Bastian & Bastiana is the In Series’ answer to the usual annual holiday traditions — a charming, little opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, written when he was only 12 years-old. Artistic Director Carla...

‘By George, By Ira, By Gershwin’ at The In Series

The In Series brings to life some of the funnest and iconic music of the 20th century by George Gershwin with most song lyrics by his brother Ira. They started out on Broadway before making it big on...

In the Moment: Aaron Copland’s ‘The Tender Land’ by The In Series

How fortunate we are to have The In Series. Over the decades it has taken artistic risks for audiences to extend their knowledge and experiences with a creative artist’s more rarely produced works, or...

Aaron Copland’s ‘The Tender Land’ at The In Series

In their Americas season, the In Series tackles the quintessentially American composer Aaron Copland and his only and almost entirely unknown opera The Tender Land. Horace Everett wrote the libretto...

‘Latina Supremes’ at The In Series

The In Series “Made in America” season launches in Latin and South America with a special cabaret of the works Latina songwriters as a part of the DC Women’s Voices Festival, Latina Supremes. The...

‘Latino Music Fever’ at the In Series

The In Series takes on the music of our Southern neighbors in a concert full of classic hits from Mexico and Cuba, many of which made a climb up the U.S. pop charts. If the tunes feel particularly...

‘The Romantics Wagner & Liszt’ at The In Series

The In Series self-described salon-style concert tribute is a celebration of musical mastery – from the two composers featured to the pianists and singers – The Romantics Wagner & Liszt is an...

‘Don Giovanni’ at The In Series

The In Series takes Mozart to a 1920s bible belt Revival in a creative and fun reimagining of Don Giovanni. Artistic Director Carla Hübner commissioned a new English language libretto by Bari Biern to...

A Look at The Staged Reading of ‘A Family Reunion at Maryland Opera Studio

It can be hard for a modern audience to relate to opera. It’s not often in our lives that we encounter a countess, death by consumption or a lover in disguise. But almost every day, we encounter...

‘What I Wanted to Sing When I Grew Up’ at The In Series

What I Wanted to Sing When I Grew Up is pure indulgence for audience and singer Fleta Hylton, a soprano powerhouse and DC institution. Billed as a lounge-opera-cabaret, Hylton basically picked all of...