ENCOMPASS 2004 MAINSTAGE PRODUCTION

A PERFECT PLAN

Perfect Plan -- Delightful comic opera by Seymour Barab at Symphony Space.

Encompass New Opera Theatre teamed up with the After Dinner Opera Company to pay tribute to one of America’s most prolific and popular musical personalities, composer Seymour Barab. A Perfect Plan is a crisscrossing, hop-scotching romp of a comic opera leading its seven characters into a labyrinth of hilarious entanglements, spinning out a madcap tale of gold digging, falsified identities, and all’s-well-that-ends-well love affairs.

“The Period music was… a delight, and the splendid cast and Nancy Rhodes’ direction made ‘A Perfect Plan’ great fun to see and hear…the precise orchestra was conducted with spirit by John Yaffe.” - Bill Zakariasen, The Westsider

“Brilliant … the cast was lively and accomplished.”- Shirley Fleming, Musical America

SEYMOUR BARAB (1921 – 2014) was an American composer of opera, songs and instrumental and chamber music, as well as a cellist, organist and pianist. He was a long-time member of the Philip Glass Ensemble. Renowned as a cellist, he performed with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Philadelphia Orchestras. He was a founding member of the Composers String Quartet, based at Columbia University, and celebrated for their performances of 20th-century American composers.  He played the viola da gamba and helped form the New York Pro Musica, one of the first ensembles to reintroduce baroque and renaissance music.

Barab’s proclivity for musical theatre has made his operas consistently performed, especially his comic one-acts and those for young audiences, and he has been called “the Rossini of our time.” His Little Red Riding Hood was the first American opera performed in China during the post-isolationist period; and his highly praised full-length Civil War opera Philip Marshall, which uses Dostoyevsky’s THE IDIOT as a point of departure, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. The Toy Shop, commissioned by the New York City Opera, was performed at the Kennedy Center and he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Opera Association.

Mr. Barab’s musicianship included a stint at Birdland, playing in a small string orchestra accompanying Charlie Parker and Stan Getz; and as a recording studio musician, he performed on hundreds of popular music records with everyone from Elvis Presley to Frank Sinatra and John Lennon.