Like many divas, Briana Legreide isn't afraid to voice her emotions in a big way. So when the fourth grader at the Hatchery Hill Elementary School tried out for the school opera, she boldly burst into song and won a role. "In opera, the feelings are so big that you just have to start singing," she says.
But Briana, 10, and her fellow students at the Hackettstown, New Jersey, school weren't only singing opera this year. With help from the Metropolitan Opera Guild in New York City, second and fourth graders created the Dream Team Opera Company. Its mission: to compose, stage and sing an original opera, all in a single school year. An opera is a play in which the characters sing their lines.
Through a guild program called Creating Original Opera, teachers and students learned how to produce an opera. Once the company was formed, kids applied for jobs. Students became composers, performers, set and costume designers and stagehands.
Throughout the school year, students and teachers worked on the opera, incorporating subjects like writing, math and science into the process. Debra Evans, the Opera Guild's director of education, says the program gives kids a "better understanding of what they can do."
Curtain Up! It's Show Time
The Dream Team members discovered that they could do a lot. Before any music was written, students and teachers chose
the theme for the year's project: "If you face your fears, your fears will disappear." On April 15, the Dream Team
performed the opera for the first time. The Witches of Camp Fun-a-Lot tells the spooky tale of campers confronting
their fear of witches.
Opening-day jitters filled the dressing room. Makeup artists applied lipstick to the actors. Composer Alex Bunting, 10, reviewed the lyrics of his hip-hop opera song "Dream Wrap." Seven-year-old electrician Timothy Lee checked the spotlight in the theater.
After the last note had been sung and the curtain had come down, production manager Amber Osmun, 10, summed up the experience: "Opera is a lot of hard work, but it's also mainly fun." Now that's something for any diva to sing about!