English Touring Opera's first show in their new Sheffield home
Sheffield has a vibrant, diverse cultural and creative industries sector with a broad range of arts organizations calling the city their home. Now there is a new arrival – English Touring Opera (ETO) which relocated from London last autumn as part of the Arts Council England Transfer Programme.
ETO already had a well-established connection with the city through its regular visits over two decades to Sheffield Theatres on its tours and through its work with the Sheffield Music Hub and partner schools in the area. The company is settling into its new home well and this week they are performing their first opera in Sheffield since the relocation. “We are very much a touring company so we are quite fleet of foot and around 90 percent of our work was outside of London anyway,” says Robin Norton-Hale, general director of English Touring Opera. “It is now about getting to know Sheffield better as a more permanent base. We immediately felt really welcomed by organizations here.”
On Friday, the company will be presenting Vincenzo Bellini’s 1830 bel canto opera The Capulets and the Montagues at Sheffield’s Lyceum Theatre and Norton-Hale is looking forward to sharing it with local audiences. “It is a really fabulous production and we have had fantastic feedback from critics and audiences so far,” she says. “People will recognize the Romeo and Juliet story at the centre of it but it is not quite the same as the Shakespeare play – this is based on his source material. It starts in the middle of the action – Romeo and Giulietta have already met and are having a secret love affair but the narrative here is more about the families and the impact of the gang violence.”
It is a gritty reworking of the familiar story which brings the warring families’ emotional and political struggle to the fore. ETO’s production is set in New York’s Little Italy in the late 1960s early 1970s; its design and look influenced by American movies about mafia violence of that period made by directors such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. “It is a very stylish, beautifully theatrical production,” says Norton-Hale. “And it is a compact story. Apart from Romeo and Giulietta there are only three other main characters and then there is an ensemble of gang members.”
A core aim of the company is to introduce new audiences to opera. “For us opera is music theatre; it is about storytelling and really high-quality playing – we have an orchestra of around 25 musicians – and singing,” says Norton-Hale. “We want to break down barriers to people enjoying opera. We are trying to engage people of all ages to come.” ETO’s learning and participation programme is extensive. In addition to their theatre-based productions, they create specially commissioned operas for children, families and young people with special educational needs. “We commission two new operas for young people every year,” says Norton-Hale. “The one touring at the moment is The Vanishing Forest, a kind of sequel to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with an environmental angle, which has toured to lots of schools in Sheffield already.” The company also runs a series of creative workshops for people living with dementia and their carers, as well as opera making workshops in secondary schools and songwriting workshops designed to benefit young people’s mental health.
The company have already been in touch with local arts charity Music in the Round, the leading national producer of chamber music, with whom they are looking to do some work, and they are also working with Sheffield Hallam University. “We will be making a film in the summer, a short 15-minute opera, with students on the MA film course,” says Norton-Hale. “It is all going to be shot on location on the streets of Sheffield and the students will be filming and editing, working with our director.” They have established a new partnership with the Samuel Worth Chapel, a pop-up performance space, where they will be presenting their popular cabaret Frau That’s What I Call Music, a celebration in words and music of female songwriters. “And we are very open to hearing from other Sheffield organizations who might like to work with us,” says Norton-Hale.
Other future planned projects include a specially commissioned community opera for 2027 and developing further new partnerships with arts, community and educational organizations in their new home city and across the North. “Sheffield really appealed to us as a hugely creative and energetic place,” says Norton-Hale. “Our move here is an opportunity for us to be more rooted somewhere and to make long-term connections that will benefit our creativity. We are excited about the possibilities.”
The Capulets and the Montagues, sung in Italian with English surtitles, is at the Lyceum Theatre, Sheffield on April 4. There is a pre-show talk Q&A session with the ETO creative team sheffield-theatres.co.uk