GRINDR: The Opera – Book, Music, Lyrics by Erik Ransom
Stage Director – Leland “Buzz” Kimball
Music Director – James W. Fuerst
GRINDR: The Opera puts the most notorious gay hook-up app into the exaggerated world of opera. With musical styles ranging from baroque to contemporary pop, GRINDR: The Opera is a daring, humorous look at the changing landscape of gay relationships, and the greatest catalyst for the shift.
We meet GRINDR, a mythical siren from remote antiquity who has been awoken from her millennial slumber by technology. Her power, which is derived from human lust, is exhibited as she manipulates her gay devotees in soaring soprano fashion. The boys, Devon (a romantic), Tom (a cynic), Jack (a twink) and Don (a Daddy), meet via the medium of the Grindr app, each seeking a different type of connection. GRINDR guides them to intersect to hilarious and calamitous results, culminating in a grand finale wherein all the dirty laundry tumbles out.
Though the opera lives in the world of parody, GRINDR: The Opera touches on some very serious, hot-button issues that exist in the gay community.
CAST
James M. Brown – Grindr
Bob Quintana – Don
Connor Twigg – Tom
Timothy Sheridan – Devon
Antoine Martinez-Jones – Jack