Pierrot Lunaire – a cabaret opera

The phenomenal music ensemble eighth blackbird and soprano Lucy Shelton team up with puppet theatre artist Blair Thomas in a staging of Arnold Schoenberg’s seminal 1912 song-cycle, Pierrot Lunaire – a cabaret opera. Pierrot–the comic stock character from Italian commedia dell’arte–is reflected through the dark lens of late nineteenth-century European cabaret. Richly emotive and overflowing with expressionistic longing, Schoenberg’s masterful setting of twenty-one poems by the Belgian symbolist Albert Giraud summons the spirit of Pierrot in a search for artistic inspiration. Thomas’s evocative staging of puppetry, use of shadows, and costumed members of eighth blackbird visually underscores Schoenberg’s powerful, hallucinatory musical landscape.