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Well, that’s a headline you don’t see every day, right? This week, Hole frontwoman Courtney Love will be making her debut as an opera singer as part of the Prototype Festival taking place in New York City from January 8th-17th. She will play the female lead role in Todd Almond’s Kansas City Choir Boy, Almond playing her jilted boyfriend.
Described as a “theatricalized concept album,” Kansas City Choir Boy follows teenager Athena (played by Love), who leaves her boyfriend in Kansas City to pursue a musical career in New York City. When she goes missing, the story heads into Gone Girl territory by bringing the 24-hour news cycle into the mix, focusing on the media’s obsession with missing girls.
According to Rolling Stone, Almond was inspired to write Kansas City Choir Boy by real-life tragedies:
After being hired by the Juilliard School of Music to perform “The Odyssey,” Almond discovered that the person playing Athena was murdered. Years later, while writing music in Kansas City, he saw a news report about another missing girl, triggering memories of the murdered actress. After imagining that she “ran off to the big city to make something of herself, and then…fell into the wrong hands,” he wrote the role that would eventually go to Love.
For her part, Love says she “fell in love” with the production and that it’s “giving [her] real mojo.” Watch Love perform a song from Kansas City Choir Boy in the video above
Source: The New York Times via Rolling Stone
