ON a balmy Sunday in early June, Grant Gershon takes the podium, ready to rehearse yet another show with yet another ensemble. The music director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale has helped launch many challenging pieces. This assignment, however, is a little different.
It does involve a new work -- an opera, "Keepers of the Night," by Peter Ash and Donald Sturrock -- and a score that Gershon says is "as sophisticated as anything that appears at the Dorothy Chandler." But "Keepers," which was commissioned by the Los Angeles Children's Chorus, is the rare opera intended to be performed primarily by kids but enjoyed by a broader audience.
"This isn't just a young person's thing," says director Corey Madden. "It's a very smart and funny fable about the opera world and about the power of the young to see through adult social and artistic pretensions."
Sturrock and Ash's story line follows the adventures of the four Knight children, who go camping in their backyard but end up in the imaginary forest of Arcadia, where a lovers' quarrel between an owl and the moon leads to mischief, magic and revolution.
The half-million-dollar project -- which will run from Thursday through Sunday at the Alex Theatre in Glendale -- is the most ambitious undertaking in LACC's 21-year history. The organization has gained national acclaim for its concerts and appearances with the Master Chorale, Los Angeles Opera and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But it has never attempted anything on this scale. That's why it has enlisted the aid of such veterans as Gershon, Madden, mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzman, baritone Malcolm MacKenzie and soprano Lynette Tapia. (The other guest soloist is soprano Lauren Libaw, a chorus alumna who is studying music at Yale.)
In some ways, though, the stars will be 65 'tweens and teens, most of whom will perform in groups representing bats, mosquitoes and other creatures. Since the fall, artistic director Anne Tomlinson and her staff have guided the entire chorus through the complex score. Now Madden is combining four weeks of rehearsal with an "opera camp" designed to introduce cast members to the basics of stage life. The first lesson -- one everyone has picked up all too quickly -- is that the success of something years in the making can depend on one month of preproduction frenzy.
