IN Series to World Premiere Damien Geter & Jarrod Lee’s ‘The Delta King’s Blues’
By David SalazarIN Series is set to present the world premiere of “The Delta King’s Blues” this December in Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
The new blues opera by composer Damien Geter and librettist Jarrod Lee is set in a juke-joint environment and is inspired by the legend of Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, who made a fateful deal with the devil.
“My inspiration for ‘The Delta King’s Blues’ came after I watched the Netflix documentary entitled ‘Devil at the Crossroads’ about Robert Johnson,” said Geter per an official press release. “I vaguely knew of Johnson, but after digging a little more about his story, I quickly learned that he is arguably the most important American musician whose influence is still heard today. After sitting on this story for some time, in 2019, while discussing potential stories for the stage, I told my collaborator Jarrod Lee about the idea of creating an operatic adaptation of Johnson’s transaction with the Devil—and the rest is history, as they say.”
Stage direction is by Alicia Washington, with Matthew Lynch making his U.S. conducting debut. The cast includes soprano Melissa Wimbish, tenor Albert Lee, bass-baritone Christian Simmons, baritone Marvin Wayne Allen III, and tenor Jonathan Pierce Rhodes. The score combines blues instrumentation with a classical string quartet.
The opera is set to take the stage on Dec. 6–7 and 12–14 at the Pop-Up Theater on 340 Maple Drive SW in Washington, D.C., followed by showcases at 2640 Space in Baltimore on Dec. 19–21.
“The Delta King’s Blues represents in one visionary project all the artistic and social threads of IN Series,” said Artistic Director Timothy Nelson. “It celebrates the birth of the blues as a fundamentally American art form while expanding opera’s canon through new voices and stories.”
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