Hi, this is Lucy, co-founder of More Than Musical. People are usually quite fascinated by how much time and effort it took us to put an opera together, I would share with you some facts behind the production of The Kiss of Tosca.
The soul of our The Kiss of Tosca is our Director/Artistic Director Mr. Nic Muni, hence the first step to create this Opera was to discuss with Nic, regarding to his vision. We confirmed the repertoire (i.e. which opera we are presenting), the venue and the performance dates around 1 year ago.
At around the same time we confirmed that we are presenting a 90mins adaptation of Puccini’s Tosca, we started to find our talents – how many singers do we need? What are the voice types? They must be available for our performance dates plus 10-14 extra dates prior the Premiere for rehearsals, hence locking their schedules is a very important step.
After 2-3 months after we have decided that we are presenting The Kiss of Tosca, our Director started to share his drawings with us, began with the floor & lighting plans. As we are presenting the opera at Annex, a black-box style venue with no fixed seats, we are basically renting an “empty box” with no infrastructure and technical support. We are bringing in every single light, projectors, screen, chairs and furniture you are seeing in the Opera!
From the moment we got the drawings from Director, we started to work closely with our Production manager and vendors to sort out big items like projectors & screens, smaller but essential items like pops and costumes. As we are a new opera company, we are very tight in budget and human resources, hence we spend a lot of time to source for the best of values – in terms of price and effect. Trust me, each time you come to our opera, you are experiencing a world-class opera production!
On the other hand, we also needed to start planning for PR & Marketing. How and where should we be advertising? What parties/organizations can we collaborate with? When should we start selling tickets? What is our Marketing and PR plan? What is the point of creating beautiful operas without reaching to as many as we can? We need to put the same effort in creating the production as well as to spread our word. We started selling tickets of The Kiss of Tosca in July, since then, we have been monitoring our ticket sales, social media accounts closely, to attract more eyeballs and website traffics.
Every day, our core team members and volunteers are working very hard behind the scene, as we want to bring you a moment of magic and an escape from the world by coming to our operas. Check out our other programmes on www.morethanmusical.org to see if anything interests you!