John Adams
I Was Looking At The Ceiling And Then I Saw The Sky

Stage Director Conductor Producer Lighting Design

About

SoCal Premiere
Outdoor performance at the Ford Amphitheatre, Hollywood

John Adams' "I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky," his groundbreaking 1995 experiment in vernacular American music theater, is both a worldly and spiritual response to the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the Northridge earthquake that followed two years later. That Long Beach Opera's Southern California premiere of "Ceiling/Sky" occurred under artificially pleasant SoCal conditions Saturday night in the lovely John Anson Ford Amphitheatre in L.A. could hardly have been lost on anyone. The events in Ferguson and later the quake in Napa make this "earthquake/romance" shockingly relevant. –– LA Times 

Reviews

Though it was called a “concert performance,” there was plenty of action on the Ford stage, where Mitisek had his seven singers sitting on a row of chairs that became a police car and earthquake rubble, among other things. He led eight musicians in the score by Adams, with whom Mitisek has a good deal of experience, since the company produced Adams’ “Nixon in China” in 2010 and the controversial “The Death of Klinghoffer” earlier this year.

Credits

Photos

Long Beach Opera 2014

Photographers: Keith Ian Polakoff / Doris Koplik