Clearly, this company seems to regard the art of perpetuating its identity crisis as fundamental to its image. Equally clearly, they seem blissfully unaware of the rather more familiar (in Europe, at least) connotation of the term "Music Theatre". Somehow, I don't expect it to mount productions of
Die Soldaten - or even the home-grown
Montezuma or
What Next? any time soon. On this basis, "what makes an American opera?" is presumably any stage work composed by an American citizen that people who think as this company does would rather decribe as anything at all other than an "opera" - cuz op'ra's élitist, innit?...
