LITTLE WOMEN

Mark Adamo’s operatic adaptation of Little Women brings Louisa May Alcott’s classic coming-of-age novel to life in a fresh and powerful way. First commissioned by Houston Grand Opera in 1998 and hailed as a “masterpiece” by John Rockwell in the New York Times for its New York City Opera premiere in 2003, this American opera has become one of the most frequently performed contemporary pieces, celebrated for its emotional depth and resonant themes of family, sisterhood, growing up, and coming home.

Composer Adamo, who also wrote the libretto, blends lyrical melodies with contemporary musical textures to vividly realize each beloved character, while capturing the internal conflict of iconic central character, Jo March, who fears that growing up inevitably means growing apart from her family and her sisters, Meg, Beth and Amy.

Little Women stage director Claire Choquette, winner of the Opera America Robert L.B. Tobin Director-Designer Prize in 2022, expresses our ongoing fascination with the work:
When people think of Little Women, it feels very nostalgic. It's a book that many of us read when we were younger, when we were starting to dive into the classics. But it's also an important piece of literature with a fully relatable story about sisterhood, and about being intentional with family connection in an era when women were starting to explore options and opportunities outside the home.

Last performed by Fort Worth Opera in 2005, Little Women makes its 2024 Fort Worth homecoming as a fully staged mainstage production, with full orchestra accompaniment by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Tyson Deaton. Mezzo-soprano Kelly Guerra — who arrives in Fort Worth fresh from her Metropolitan Opera debut in Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang’s Ainadamar — leads the talented young cast in the role of Jo March. Her portrayal of Jo is complemented by Bridget Cappel (mezzo-soprano) as Meg, Mary Feminear (soprano) as Beth, and Megan Koch (lyric coloratura soprano) as Amy.

In this production, audiences will experience all the heart, humor and drama of Little Women in the intimate setting of the W. E. Scott Theatre, which features a semi-thrust stage to bring the performers — each a wonderful actor as well as a brilliant singer — closer to the audience.

Whether you're an opera lover or a longtime fan of the novel, this production promises to deliver a sophisticated, relatable, and deeply heartfelt take on the timeless classic. We hope that you’ll join us!
 

Composer Note

More than a century after its publication, Louisa May Alcott's chronicle of growing up female in civil-war era New England remains a main dish in the smorgasbord of American popular fiction. Readers have devoured the adventures of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy in more than one hundred languages. In our own land and tongue, Hollywood has had to film the piece once every 20 years or so to slake the recurring appetite. The applause that hailed Little Women in its own century echoes in its steadily rising prestige at the close of our own; writers as diverse as Simone de Beauvoir and Joyce Carol Oates have claimed Alcott as a literary ancestor. 

I read the book as a child and loved it. And I recognized that Little Women itself solves certain problems for the opera composer. The novel itself — part classic, part mass-culture perennial — as well as its young, lively characters in their antique locale reminded me of opera itself these days: an art buzzing with new writing and thinking while still working with resources (the bel-canto trained voice, the acoustic orchestra) that stabilized one hundred years ago. I knew Jo's wild imagination, her haunting memories, would free me musically to range between abstract and tonal, poetic and vernacular, song and symphonic forms. 

The conflict of Little Women is Jo versus the passage of time. Realize this about Jo: alone among adolescent protagonists in classic American fiction (Tom Sawyer, Holden Caulfield, Portnoy), she's happy where she is. Adored by her family, she adores them in turn. Not so poor as to starve, Jo is just poor enough to see in each small windfall gold to delight a Midas. Jo knows adulthood will only graduate her from her perfect home. She fights her own and her sisters' growth because she knows deep down that growing up means growing apart. 

— Mark Adamo