A new documentary is screening at the Magnolia Theatre Tuesday evening, a documentary that hopes to raise awareness about a medical issue. But KERA's Jerome Weeks reports that the way the film was produced also makes it noteworthy.

• KERA radio report:

• Expanded online version:

Moviemakers and actors have often helped raise money for social change. Melina McKinnon does both at once. She fundraises for a movie and the cause that’s the subject of the film. Then she uses the finished documentary to educate people and raise more money for the cause. McKinnon is the founder of M3 Films. What she does has been dubbed “filmanthropy” – combining independent filmmaking with philanthropy.

Dallas, McKinnon says, is a good town for this combination.

McKINNON: “Dallas is such an incredibly philanthropic town. And the time and energy that's spent toward the arts here? We feel that this is fertile ground to have this concept planted and grow.”

The idea is not unique. Ted Leonsis, owner of the Washington Capitals hockey team, bankrolled the film Nanking two years ago with much the same goal, the same term.  (In fact, Leonsis' company, SnagFilms.com, has an online  library of more than 1,000 cause-oriented docs which viewers can watch and support.) There was even a Filmanthropy Festival last fall in Los Angeles.

But McKinnon has established her project as an ongoing business model – and not a one-shot deal for a favorite benefit. She’s working on three documentaries she hopes will inspire audiences. The first completed one is Torey’s Distraction, directed by Tisha Blood. It’s about Apert Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that leaves infants with skulls that are fused and can’t expand as the brain does. The families come to North Texas for the dozens and dozens of craniofacial surgeries needed as the children grow up. Andrea Harrah is the mother of Torey, whom the film follows from birth to adolescence:

ANDREA HARRAH: “When I first had her, they said we should just put her in a home because she won’t amount to anything. She’d probably just lay there like a vegetable.”

But Torey had a different verdict:

TOREY: “Na-na, a-boo-boo! You can’t catch me!”

McKinnon’s two other filmanthropy projects concern the bone marrow bank for transplants and the civil war in Sierra Leone. Both are currently in development.

Thursday night, The Crow Collection of Asian Art kicked off a new series, First Thursdays: The Silk Road Lounge. The series started off by featuring the music of Space City Gamelan, a musical ensemble based in Houston.

A gamelan is a musical ensemble of Indonesian origin and features instruments ranging from xylophones, drums, flutes, metallophones and several others. What makes it distinctly come together, is that the instruments are built and tuned to stay together. In other words, each unique set of instruments can only be played together, not mixed and matched with other ensembles.

Wonderful Asian and Asian influenced music wafted through the room, courtesy of Reid Robinson (DJ Woodtronic), who spins at each event before and after the main performance.

In the above video, we caught up with the Director of Education for the Crow Collection of Asian Art, Tracy Bays-Boothe to talk to her more about this series.

The next Silk Road Lounge event will be held on April 1, featuring Alash, a quartet ensemble of master throat singers from Tuva.

First Thursdays are free events and open to the public. My suggestion? Get there early for the best seat. It fills up fast!

"Track By Track" appears every other week on Art&Seek. During the podcast, Texas musicians play their new albums and discuss what went into making them with Paul Slavens, host of The Paul Slavens Show Sunday nights at 8 on KXT, 91.7 FM.

You can download and subscribe to the podcast right here.

Paul's previous podcast featured Denton's Bridges and Blinking Lights discussing the band's current release, Heroes, Guns and Snakes. This week, Paul talks with Dallas' Nervous Curtains about Out of Sync With Time, the band's debut release.

Click the player below to listen to the podcast:

Also, be sure to check the Art&Seek blog during The Paul Slavens Show this Sunday as Paul blogs live during the broadcast.

Gustave Courbet, The Sea Arch at Etretat, (oil on canvas), 1869

• Scott Cantrell's review for The Dallas Morning News

• Gaile Robinson's review for the Star-Telegram

• KERA radio review:

• Expanded online review:

It's an art-historical commonplace that the advent of photography influenced the French Impressionists. Crudely put, the Impressionists eventually opted out of the competition — and left ordinary, realistic reproductions to the camera while they pursued painting's special world of light and color.

But The Lens of Impressionism, the new exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, takes a very detailed, on-the-ground-sea-and-air look at what was a much more complex interaction. The daguerreotype, the first practical photographic process, was invented in 1839. Some 30 years later, the Impressionists rocked the French art world. The Lens of Impressionism concentrates on the period between those two events and on just 100 miles or so of Normandy coast.

In this tight-focused way, the show details what happened during major beachheads in history, technology — and art. Early photographers wanted to do what painters could: freeze an ocean wave or catch a passing cloud. But daguerreotypes required an exposure time as long as 30 minutes. Soon, something of an arms race started as new inventions — the calotype, the tintype — made exposures faster. Each offered different advantages (a more charcoal-y grain, a richer spectrum of greys), and photographers experimented — learning, for instance, to shoot boats beached at low tide, so there'd be less seawater to blur the image.

Louis-Alphonse Davanne, No. 1 Etretat, The Chapel (albumen print), 1864

Photographers also followed painters in what they traditionally depicted: the still life, the portrait, the seascape.  Many early French photographers — Henri le Secq, Gustave Le Gray — had even studied as painters. On the Norman beaches,  photographers initially concentrated on not so much the sea but the land: ships in the harbor, the chalk cliffs, the lighthouse. It wasn't until their technology improved that they were able to do what painters had been doing — looking directly out to sea, catching the flicker of sunlight on water, clouds piling up and waves breaking.

In doing all this, the camera inevitably captured what painters had consciously left out, and painters took notice of this. In Lens, there are fascinating comparisons of the exact same stretch of beach, viewed by both a painter and a photographer. The painters often go for close-ups of cliffs and sand and ships, limiting the number of people in view. But when the photographers pull back, we suddenly see all of this — human clutter.

That's because artists had traditionally come to Normandy for its clear, northern light and its quaint, medieval towns. The Romantics  (Eugene Delacroix) and the Barbizon painters (Jean-Francois Millet, Camille Corot) started exploring the area precisely for this 'old-fashionedness.' But an Impressionist like Claude Monet, for example, came to love Normandy for almost everything (see Richard Brettell's Monet in Normandy) — for its haystacks, the cathedral at Rouen, the beaches at sunset, the promenades and hotels (below, the Hotel des Roches Noires at Trouville, 1870))

Despite these long-standing icons and traditions, the region began fast losing any 'eternal' status.  After the railroad from Paris to Le Havre was completed in 1847, the Norman towns became fashionable seaside resorts. We see them fill up with early versions of ourselves, that other modern invention:  the tourist.  In the images, the parasols, the pleasure boats, the changing cabins and carts, they all begin to push out the fishermen, the warships, the crumbling old sea walls.

But in the book accompanying the exhibition, The Lens of Impressionism: Photography and Painting Along the Normandy Coast, 1850-1874, Dean MacCannell makes the provocative argument that, despite their appearances here, these dressed-up French beachcombers are not the same as today's tourists. There's very little real swimming or sunbathing going on, for instance. (Swimming — or rather, taking a dip — in the cold English Channel had only recently become a health fad). Instead, MacCannell points to the tremendous political and military upheavals of the era, including the Revolution of 1848, the rise and fall of the Second Empire and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 — to help explain why Parisians would flock here. 'Escape' is more like it. Indeed, painters like Monet and Pisarro didn't stop with Normandy — they fled across the Channel.

Nevertheless, through the course of the 90 works in the exhibition, we see painters turning away from seaside rustics, the traditional masts and sails and the local church towers to what would be one of Impressionism’s central yet innovative subjects: the middle class enjoying itself.

Edouard Manet, The Beach at Berck (oil on canvas) 1873

The Lens of Impressionism is the kind of immersion in an art-historical period that’s more typical of the Kimbell or Amon Carter. In fact, the exhibition originated at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, but DMA curator Heather MacDonald has shrewdly expanded it. One interactive gallery in the show lays out different types of early photos — borrowed from the Amon Carter's extensive collection. We can see how painterly they really were with their moody shadows, alternately crisp or fuzzy details.

The Lens of Impressionism may lack major-masterpiece firepower, but it’s full of such intriguing discoveries — and the occasional little marvel of the painter's art. Edouard Manet's The Beach at Berck,  for example, is a gossamer burst of earthtoned brushwork, the ships like black wedges or asterisks, while an Edgar Degas pastel and a James Whistler oil are both such diaphanous, watercolor-like washes and blocks of color, they seem to have leaped over Impressionism entirely for the modern, translucent abstractions of a Rothko or a Diebenkorn.

Fittingly, perhaps, The Lens of Impressionism features one other new technological advance. It’s the first DMA show with an audio tour you can access on your smartphone or via one of the museum's iPod Touches, available on loan for free. The DMA introduced its smARTphone initiative last year with a new website that accesses interpretive materials. But Lens marks the system's  "newly expanded" launch.

James McNeil Whistler, Sea and Rain (oil on canvas), 1865

Facing off over violins and formal wear: Jakie Cabe, Mark Shum, David Lambert, Meg Bauman and Elias Taylorson (l to r) in Circle Theatre's Opus

• Punch Shaw's review for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram

• Mark Lowry's review for Theater Jones

• Lindsey Wilson's review for FrontRow

• Lawson Taitte's review for the Dallas Morning News

• Critical Rant & Rave review
  

• KERA radio story:

• Expanded online story:
  

Circle Theatre in Fort Worth is presenting the Texas premiere of Opus by Michael Hollinger — which concerns a setting and a sub-culture rarely portrayed in a stage drama: the world of classical music, specifically, the troubled inner workings of a famous string quartet.

But how accurate — how convincing — is that depiction?

Opus was inspired by such groups as the Emerson String Quartet and the Guarneri Quartet (who decided to retire last year) – plus Hollinger’s own years studying the viola at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. In the play, the Lazara Quartet (named for a fictitious Italian violin-maker) has lost one of its members. The three remaining musicians must replace him fast. They’re scheduled to play a  concert at the White House — with a television audience in the millions.

Soon, insults are flying, and we learn about the working relationships — and sexual tensions — among the musicians, one of whom also has cancer. In Fort Worth, David Lambert plays Carl, the group’s cellist:

LAMBERT: “Three or four days in the studio, pretty much around the clock? Inevitably, things get tense. With four opinions in the room, four passionate individuals, sometimes tempers flare. Occasionally, there might be a hint of violence.”

Curt Thompson (front) at the Mimir Chamber Music Festival

Directed by Alan Shorter, the actors mime the bowing of the different musicians as they play their instruments, although they don't imitate their fingering — which still provides a reasonable illusion. It's not really important, however. What is important is Hollinger's dramatic portrayal of work and play and personal interactions inside a chamber group. It's the string quartet as onstage dysfunctional family.

Curt Thompson is the founder of the Mimir Chamber Music Festival in Fort Worth; he also teaches violin at Texas Christian University.

Thompson found Opus entertaining, partly because it is pretty accurate, he says, when it comes to the different personalities, the different roles musicians take on in a string quartet. Violinists, for instance – and Thompson is one, remember – violinists are a bit like sopranos in opera, he says. They can be prima donnas.

THOMPSON: “I hope I don’t get lots of e-mails about this. They tend to be a little flaky sometimes, a little self-absorbed. And when that happens, sometimes sharp – in pitch.”

Opus certainly bears out this characterization with its temperamental lead violinists (Mark Shum and Elias Taylorson). One — the more eccentric and visionary one — is even on serious anti-depressants.  The new replacement played by Meg Bauman, seems reasonable enough — extremely cautious though smart. But then, she's just starting out and wants the job. She's not likely to act up already.

Cellists, on the other hand, Thompson says, are more grounded than violinists — much like Carl, whose cancer, he explains, has given him a perspective on life: He doesn't have time for the bickering. In fact, Thompson calls the cellist the quarterback of the string quartet.

THOMPSON: “Cellists tend to be controlling without seeming like they’re controlling. They’re driving the harmonies because they’re playing the lowest notes. They are the rhythmic motor, controlling the tempi, controlling the balances. I’ve always said, if you want to have a successful string quartet, first thing you need to look for is a great cellist.”

Thompson says he grants playwright Michael Hollinger some dramatic license for all the drama in Opus. (Hollinger wrote Circle's hit comedy last season, Incorruptible.) The playwright has consciously cranked up the tension with the White House concert looming — otherwise, the musicians would normally have spent weeks, even months, auditioning people. And the play does end with a violent, highly dramatic gesture — one that doesn't seem entirely necessary, given that the drama's central issues have been more or less resolved.

(There's also a logical flaw in that resolution. The newcomer accepts a major deal with someone whom she's never performed with. Considering the group's stress on consensus and its drive, its fundamental need, for a united sound, her ready agreement seems a little unlikely.)

Still, for the most part, Hollinger has just condensed and heightened the conflicts that can actually trouble a high-performing chamber group, Thompson says.  In this comic melodrama, those conflicts arise over everything from preparing coffee and punctual work habits to psychological problems and whether Ludwig van Beethoven in one of his great, last quartets (Opus 131) should have added the notation poco crescendo – meaning, "growing a little louder."

Even here, Hollinger demonstrates that ultimately what's at stake in his play isn't whether Lazara will continue to make great music but the musicians' decision-making, their relationship to each other and to their special sound. Can this marriage be saved?

CARL: [interrupting rehearsal] Woah, woah, woah.

ELLIOT: What now?

CARL: There’s no crescendo there.

ALAN: Poco crescendo.

CARL: There isn’t any — poco or otherwise.

ELLIOT: Well, there should be.

GRACE: Why?

ALAN: It parallels bar 16.

CARL: Except bar 16 has a poco crescendo.

ELLIOT: So it’s an echo.

CARL: An echo?

ALAN: Setting up bar 16.

CARL: Since when does an echo precede the sound itself?

Elias Taylorson as Elliot and Mark Shrum as Dorian (l to r) with a matched-set of Lazara viola and violin.

Playing in a string quartet is much more democratic than playing in a symphony orchestra. Thompson believes chamber music is the highest form of music-making because it calls on so much, demands such undivided attention, from each string player. Which also means it can be more confrontational. There's no mediator, no decision-maker in the conductor. The players must face the music — and each other.

THOMPSON: “String quartet is much more gloves-off and personal. And to find four people of a like mind who feel the same way about music — it's very, very rare.”

Indeed, he says, there’s a legend that the members of one famous quartet fly separately to their concerts. They keep any personal contact to a minimum. Even the Mimir Festival, Thompson notes, has an unwritten rule: All debates must be finished in less than a minute.

Both of these maneuvers are attempts to wrestle with the central paradox of a successful chamber group like the Lazara Quartet. Its achievement is dependent on the dynamic tensions among the members, their abilities to compensate, to anticipate each other — and to fuse their sensibilities and talents into a single sound. Yet those same tensions, that same intimate knowledge of each other, can cause the group to blow apart.

THOMPSON: "Once in a while, you’ll hear an Emerson Quartet or a Guarneri Quartet, and there’s something so seamless and so captivating about it that you can’t imagine that they’d have any personal problems. But at the same time [laughs], you realize that they’re humans – and humans have issues with each other.”

The Circle production is a handsome one, given a warm, wood-paneled set by designer Clare Floyd deVries. It's also well-cast, although on opening night, the actors tended to hit the dramatics and the jokes harder than they need to (try it poco diminuendo, as it were, though admittedly, Elliot (Taylorson) is supposed to be overbearing and flamboyant). Engaging and intelligent, not really high-flown or highbrow, Opus doesn't require an in-depth knowledge of classical music to enjoy. Hollinger has made sure the play is accessible by giving his musicians an entertaining veneer of back-and-forth wisecracks, and Carl, the down-to-earth family man, is something of our stand-in.

Think of it as The Young Person's Guide to the String Quartet – with Laughs and Dramatic Outbursts.

Cello string image on the front page from: www.joeye.com. Image of Mimir from TCU Magazine.

In the Saturday Spotlight, we're looking at the intersection of art and architecture. CentralTrak, the artists residency at the University of Texas at Dallas, opens a new exhibition called Transitive Pairings. The show features three installations conceived by architects and artists working together. An opening reception will be held tonight from 6 to 8 p.m.

Dr. Gustavo Tolosa is an accomplished solo and chamber music pianist. He holds a Master of Music degree from the University of Redlands, a Doctorate in Piano Performance and Literature from the Eastman School of Music and was selected by the International Biographical Centre in England as one of the few to be included in the important reference title Outstanding Musicians of the 20th Century. A very accomplished vampire, indeed.

This coming weekend, Dr. Tolosa transforms into the glamorous and sophisticated chief vampire Gustave de la Croix as he and his band of urban vampires throw an intimate party and concert.

In a recent e-mail exchange, Art&Seek learned a little more about this interesting man-pire and the Vampires' Valentine Party:

A&S: How did the idea of Vampires' Valentine come about?

Dr. Gustavo Tolosa: I am always looking for new ways to bring the music to the masses. My life goal is to bring music to the world (music performance and music teaching). Even though I have a formal musical training, with a Doctorate in Piano Performance from the Eastman School of Music in New York, I consider myself a revolutionary! I am always looking for new ways to present the traditional concert setting. I wanted to present what we call a voice and piano recital in a new and innovative way and mix several genres such as a traditional concert or recital with a Broadway musical, a theater play, an opera and present it all in a setting that combines a relaxed living room atmosphere with a cabaret atmosphere with a traditional concert atmosphere. This idea was also born from my fascination with vampires and the idea that if there were real vampires, there probably would be some that are musicians. And so here we have four musical vampires!

A&S: Is this the first year for Vampires’ Valentine or have you produced this event in the past?

Dr. Gustavo Tolosa: I manage the South Side on Lamar Concert Series and the Musica For the World Concert Series, and every year I put together a Valentine's Concert. Last year, the theme was "Love & Friendship," and it was lovely. It was a dinner, dessert and concert. This is the first year that I introduce the group "The Urban Vampires" that I have formed. We will be presenting other performances during the year in different places in Dallas and around the nation, but the "Vampires' Valentine" is a creation for this year!

A&S: What should one expect when attending this event?

G.T: I love what I do and I have tremendous fun with it. I want our guests to have fun and feel the joy and power of music while they try our unique gourmet bon-bons, drinks and fabulous company. There is something for everyone in this show, and I mean everyone! What someone should not expect is a formal concert atmosphere. They can also expect great music and incredible performances given by my colleagues.

A&S: Tell me a little more about yourself and the other three vampires.

G.T: In this show the performers are: Jacquelyn Lengfelder, soprano (as Countess Erzsebet Alucard), Marquel Dionne, mezzo-soprano (as Barcelona Marceaux), Blake Davidson, tenor (as Sergei Alucard) and me, Dr. Gustavo Tolosa, Artistic Director; piano and harpsichord (as Chief Vampire Gustave De La Croix). All four of us are classically trained and have extensive performance experience, but all four of us are excited to venture into a more eclectic musical world!

A&S: Are vampires particularly fond of Valentine’s Day? If so, why?

G.T: During Vampires' Valentine, these four urban vampires (we like living in big cities and mingling with people without them noticing us) get together in their coven and hang out while they remember their past loves and love stories. Vampires do fall in love and are capable of loving. In this particular occasion, the vampires are going to reveal some of their inner most secrets and one of them is going to make a decision that will change their lives forever.

• SMU Daily Campus story

• KERA radio story:

• Expanded online story:

The former dean of one of the most important drama schools in the country will be the next chairman of the Southern Methodist University theater department.

Stan Wojewodski, Jr. ran the Yale School of Drama and the Yale Repertory Theatre for 11 years — teaching and working with some of America's most talented stage artists. This fall, he will succeed Cecil O'Neal as the chair of SMU's theater department.

Jose Bowen, dean of SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts, said that because Wojewodski has directed professional theaters, taught students and run a college, he was "the best of all possible worlds" to head the department.

BOWEN: "The biggest issue was convincing him to go back into administration. He came here because he could direct again. I had to convince him that he could still do that and direct the department."

As a graduate conservatory, Yale has produced such actors as Paul Newman, Sigourney Weaver, Edward Norton and Meryl Streep — and such playwrights as Christopher Durang and John Guare. Yale Repertory shows have won eight Tony Awards — and the theater itself has won a regional Tony Award. But Wojewodski says that he left Yale in 2002, in part, because when you add his time running Center Stage theater in Baltimore, he’d been an artistic director for 25 consecutive years. That’s why he chose just to freelance, directing different shows around the country. He didn't want to be "institutionalized" any longer, he said with a laugh.

In fact, Wojewodski was in town in 2004 staging The Importance of Being Earnest at the Dallas Theater Center when SMU approached him about talking informally to faculty and students. Wojewodski was familiar with SMU's program, having worked with the earlier generation of graduates — once known as the "SMU Mafia" — including actor Kathy Bates, playwright Beth Henley and the late Guthrie Theater director, Garland Wright.

It was just an informal talk at SMU, but a student asked Wojewodski if he missed being dean. No, he said, but he missed teaching. That led faculty members to ask if he'd like to teach there.

At SMU — where Wojewodski became an artist-in-residence in 2005 — he found it was different teaching undergraduates, and teaching these undergraduates, whom he found to be smart and committed.

WOJEWODSKI: “I was delighted by what I found. It was very challenging and really, really rewarding.”

Wojewodski became a tenured professor at SMU but has continued to freelance — he's directing Samuel Beckett's Endgame at the Undermain Theatre in April. Then, when Cecil O’Neal decided to retire, Wojewodski was asked if he'd like to replace him.

WOJEWODSKI: “I really resisted it for[laughs] for what I think of as a long time. And then faculty members and Cecil and Jose proved to be very persuasive. And I also discovered – I had no idea when I came here that I would miss that kind of ongoing contribution to a community.”

Wojewodski’s appointment as chair of SMU drama runs for three years.

• KERA radio story:

• Online story:

In its first three months of operation, Dallas' new arts complex, the AT&T Performing Arts Center, was visited by more than 93,000 people. KERA's B. J. Austin says the center's first report card shows little evidence of the recession.

The glitz and glamour of the AT&T Performing Arts Center's opening galas and performances attracted a lot of new people to the arts. Seventy-one percent of total ticket sales were to “new buyers.” One of the first shows in the Winspear Opera House — 700 Sundays,  starring Billy Crystal — had the highest one-week gross compared to all other cities on that U.S. tour. And, Performing Arts Center CEO Mark Nerenhausen says the Center recently doubled the number of phone lines into its box office.

Nerenhausen: "We’re blanketing the metro area in just 90 days. That says that we’re accomplishing what we set out to do in quality of life – which made sure that this wasn’t just for the elite. But this was truly for everybody."

Dallas Council member Carolyn Davis is encouraged by the fast, apparently recession-proof  start of the public and privately-funded Performing Arts Center. But she worries the high profile center will overpower smaller neighborhood performance groups.

Davis: "Don’t miss the other ones, so they will not find themselves out of business perhaps because they don’t have the same kind of funding source."

Mark Nerenhausen says the Arts Center is forming partnerships with smaller groups to manage their ticket sales using the Arts Center’s computer system and professional staff. And partnering to discover ways to publicize and promote performance citywide.

Meanwhile, private fundraising for the AT&T Arts Center continues, competing with the funding campaign for the 2011 Super Bowl in Cowboys Stadium. The city of Dallas hopes to provide more money for continued development of the Center in the 2011 bond package. Council members will be watching box office receipts and the economy, hoping for strong performances this year.

• KERA radio story:

• Expanded online story:

UPDATE (and spoiler alert): Hey, they won!

The National Association of Television Program Executives is holding its annual conference in Las Vegas this week. They're the people who decide what programs wil run on cable, broadcast and local TV. And today, those executives will get a fiery little taste of the Fort Worth Opera Festival.

[voiceover and music from the Lone Star Opera trailer: “Yeehaw! When Cowtown and culture collide, you can bet there’s drama waiting in the wings!“]

That’s from a five-minute trailer that a Dallas company called Abernethy Media Professionals has made. It’s their pitch for a six-part TV series called Lone Star Opera. Abernethy shot hundreds of hours last season just to create the trailer, a backstage look at the Fort Worth Opera. In a national competition, the company won the opportunity — as one of three finalists — to pitch the TV executives at their conference in Las Vegas.

If Lone Star Opera wins, a distribution agency will pick up the project to sell to the right network. For a relative newcomer like Abernethy, this is one of the few ways to catch the eyes of top industry executives.

Amy Lou Abernethy, her husband Sandy and producer Russ Johnson had never even seen an opera before. Johnson says the idea started in a bar.

Russ Johnson interviewing bass-baritone Seth Carico

JOHNSON: “My wife and I met a group of people at a local winery. And they were very boisterous and fun. Eventually, the question came up, so what do you do? And they were like, ‘We’re opera singers.’ And that’s when I immediately realized the bias I had in my head that all opera singers must be tuxedo-wearing, you know, highbrow types. And here I had this great collection of young, old, fun, very boisterous, passionate people.”

The Abernethy team likes projects that overturn people’s preconceptions. They create what are called in the trade, "docu-soaps" – or in this case, a "docu-soap opera." It doesn't simply record the behind-the-scenes rehearsals and evolution of a stage show. As the work progresses, the episodes follow different characters and storylines, they find little cliffhangers and dramas.

JOHNSON: “We know in pitching this, the second we say the word ‘opera,’ people start to tune us out. So we know we have to get their attention with the non-opera bits, that we’re not going to be droning on and on about what an aria is – BUT there are compelling, interesting people who make these productions happen.”

Darren Woods, FWO general director, in Lone Star Opera

So they had to see if there were real stories to follow. Last season, what the team found wasn’t just the usual backstage tension. As a festival, the Fort Worth Opera puts on three shows in only three weeks. There are hundreds of costumes to manage, dozens and dozens of supernumeraries, rented sets to be shipped in, tickets to be sold. The scheduling complexity alone can be overwhelming. So too is the pressure on some of the young singers — even the ones who aren't in lead roles. They may be on the cusp of starting national careers, getting to break out. And this year, the Fort Worth Opera is gambling on the adaptation of Before Night Falls, a world premiere based on the memoir of the gay Cuban activist, Reinaldo Arenas, which was made into the 2000 film. Javier Bardem won an Oscar nomination portraying Arenas.

But how will it play in Texas?

Plus, for TV purposes, it doesn’t hurt that members of the opera's Young Artist Program live together in a house. It’s a classic reality-show situation: MTV's Opera World.

[From the trailer: “I think you have dirty, dirty secrets. C’mon tell me. Why you so dirty?” Laughter.]

Jon de los Santos, frazzled director of the FWO's Carmen

Sandy Abernethy says with personal issues, they can let the artists tell the stories. Some are eager.

SANDY: “One of the things we did last year was giving the performers cameras that they could use as diary cams. These guys are not wallflowers. They want a little bit of attention. So they’re very free to just tape each other and just share it with us — and it’s great.”

But the video producers were also struck by the power and artistry of opera. Johnson sees the singers as top-flight professional athletes: They work in an incredibly small, highly competitive field and the physical demands on their voices can be all-consuming. Amy Lou Abernethy says that even if their Lone Star Opera TV show isn’t picked up, they're committed to continuing with the project in some form. They’ve already launched lonestaropera.com. And they may turn their footage into a TV special.

They’re converts, she says.

[During the following, in the background, we begin to hear soprana Susanna Phillips singing Non mi dir from Don Giovanni]

AMY LOU: “The first time was when I was standing with a camera in my hand six or seven feet away from a woman who was singing full voice. And I felt it all over my body like somebody’d turned a firehose on me. And ever since then, it just opened up, and I get it. I get these beautiful instruments.”