LA Opera is taking us to sea on this week’s Sunday Opera (10/24 3:00 p.m.) with their recent production of Benjamin Britten’s 1951 opera “Billy Budd.”   Based on the novel by Herman Melville, the story centers on the naïve and innocent sailor who, after being transferred to a new ship, becomes the obsession of the Master-at-arms, John Claggart, who is accidentally killed by Billy when Claggart pushes him too far.  This results in the hanging of the young Budd who is loved by the crew and, for whom they would mutiny, but Billy, true to his good nature, resignedly goes to his fate and is hanged for the death of Claggart. 

After last month’s look at new songs that were added to film versions of musicals, we found that we had enough material for another program, and this week’s Dress Circle (10/24 7:00 p.m.) is the result.   Some of the films from which we’ve mined our songs include “Bells Are Ringing,” “Call Me Madam,” “Grease,” “Guys and Dolls,” “The Music Man,” “Evita,” and “On the Town.”  

  This Sunday at 8 pm on The Lyric Stage we have musical selections from The Threepenny Opera, whose  disreputable characters and social and political satire of Berlin in 1928 were inspired by Elisabeth Hauptman's translation of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera from 1728.

Manfred is the quintessential Byronic hero, a romantic superman who endures unimaginable suffering and mysterious guilt in connection with the death of his beloved.  He wanders the Alps, longing for extinction, and meets his fate defiantly, rejecting all authority, whether corporeal or supernatural.  When conductor Sir Thomas Beecham resurrected Schumann’s incidental music for Byron’s dramatic poem, it was an act of total reimagination.  Hear selections from this seldom-heard 1954 recording, Sunday at 10 pm.