Professor Jacob Lee, an adjunct professor at Southern Utah University, conducted a staged reading of his operatic performance named “The Dunwich Horror” on Tuesday, Oct. 22. The opera, based on works by H.P. Lovecraft, was written and composed by Lee. Performers of the opera included students, professors, and community members from Cedar City.
H.P. Lovecraft was a horror writer in the 1920s whose works mainly focused on supernatural phenomena. The characters in his stories commonly encounter terrifying creatures or scenarios. Lee’s opera is based on these works, and shares much of the same feeling.
“I’ve been working on this for over two years, so having it all come together this last week with the performers all in costumes and having all the musicians here, that was the magic,” said Lee.
A staged reading is a type of live performance in which the actors perform in front of an audience without a set or extensive rehearsals beforehand. According to Lee, it is “between a rehearsal and a performance.”
There were three scenes within the performance, each being about 20 minutes long. Each scene had their own setting and characters, with the performers rotating off of the stage in accordance with their characters in the opera. They also had costumes fitting their unique characters, and acted along with the words being sung.
The opera was accompanied by lights and a visual aid for the audience, in which photos and subtitles were shown. These visual additions contributed to the spooky feel of the opera, and assisted in portraying the emotions of the characters within it.
Within the three scenes, a story was told in which a mother had two children, a son and a daughter, both being described as bestial. The story diverges, telling of the death of the mother, the son being tasked to find an evil book known as The Necronomicon, and the daughter turning into a monster, killing townspeople and livestock within the town of Dunwich. The culmination of these events had an ending that was majorly up to the audience’s interpretation, similar to the original works of H.P. Lovecraft.
The performance ended with strong applause from the audience and bows from the performers.
To learn more about SUU Music Department’s performances and events, visit their website.
Author: Tallon Taylor
Photographer: Tallon Taylor
Editor: Tessa Cheshire
arts@suunews.net
