Audience Engagement

Lobby Display

The lobby display will be modeled after the original Terezin set design of Brundibár. There will be a wooden fence with animals' faces painted around holes through which people can stick their heads to become those animal characters. There will be a Sparrow, Cat, and Dog after the characters in the opera. There will also be a table with some colored paper and pencils for people to create art, which we will attach to the boards so their art joins ours.

Milk with Miss G!

Before every show, a member of our cast or crew will hold a reading of the book adaptation of Brundibár by Tony Kushner and Maurice Sendak. Before our Saturday show, Miss G will read the book while we all enjoy a glass of delicious, (maybe magical?!) milk! We will even paint with magical milk! *Lactose-free options are available. 

Speaker's Night

Miss G will be joined by Dr. Joy H. Calico from the University of Vanderbilt after the Thursday show to talk all things operas.

Joy H. Calico is Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Musicology and Professor of German Studies. Her scholarship focuses on the interdisciplinary study of Cold War cultural politics, Schoenberg, and opera since 1900. She is the author of two monographs, Arnold Schoenberg's 'A Survivor from Warsaw' in Postwar Europe (California, 2014) and Brecht at the Opera (California, 2008; paperback 2019), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.

Calico's Schoenberg book received the 2015 Award for an Exceptional Book in Jewish Studies and Music, as well as honorable mention for the 2016 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies; it will be published in Italian translation in 2022. Her current book projects are a monograph about operatic convention based on Saariaho’s L’amour de loin, and a co-edited volume with Justin Vickers entitled Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary.

Recent articles include studies of Saariaho’s writing for voice in Contemporary Music Review, Schoenberg and noise in the Journal of Austrian Studies, Olga Neuwirth’s opera Lost Highway for Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, and an XQuery analysis of music in avant-garde periodicals for the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. Recent book chapters include essays on Brechtian theory in contemporary opera with case studies on Yuval Sharon and South African theorist Innocentia Mhlambi (Bertolt Brecht in Context, 2021); a chapter co-authored with Clifford B. Anderson on “The Digital Flâneur: Mapping Twentieth-Century Berlin” in Quick Hits for Teaching with Digital Humanities (2020); and a piece on Helmut Lachenmann’s opera Mӓdchen mit den Schwefelhōlzern for the collection Art and Resistance in Germany (2019). Among her forthcoming publications are an article on Joan La Barbara in West Germany, and a chapter on the dramaturgies of experimental opera with Chaya Czernowin’s Infinite Now as case study.

Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Sacher Stiftung, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy in Berlin, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the DAAD, the Howard Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2015 she received the Blair Faculty Excellence Award. In winter 2019 she was Gerstein Visiting Distinguished Professor at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies and the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto.

She is a former editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS) and served as director-at-large on that society’s board 2019-21. Calico was cofounder and coordinator of the Music and Sound Studies Network of the German Studies Association (GSA) and served on the GSA Executive Board 2013-16, during which time she was also Director of Vanderbilt's Max Kade Center for European and German Studies. She currently serves on the Advisory Board of Directors for Nashville Opera and the editorial board of the Cambridge Opera Journal, and is a member of the Black Opera Research Network (BORN) working team.

Program Note