If you missed the chance to see Karen O‘s inimitable “psycho-opera,” Stop the Virgens during its two-week run at St. Ann’s Warehouse, you missed a truly unique theatrical experience that is almost impossible to convey in words.“It’s been really hard to categorize this project that we’ve been working on,” said Karen during an appearance on the WNYC radio program Soundcheck. “The closest thing that we could coin was maybe ‘opera’ but we wanted to stay away from ‘rock opera’ because it seemed a bit like a dated term. Psycho opera just fit the sort of psychedelic, semi-psychotic vibe of the project,” she explains.Produced through The Studio, the opera debuted as the centerpiece of our multi-day art and technology festival in DUMBO earlier this month. Featuring a loose, “dream logic” narrative, the opera follows Karen O as the leader of a band of other-worldly “virgens” as they journey through an emotionally charged coming of age story, of sorts. Steeped in the visual language of co-creator and production designer K.K. Barrett (of Where The Wild Things Are and Lost in Translation), the surreal spectacle was directed by Pulitzer-nominated director/playwright Adam Rapp and employed a cast of some 38 virgens, as well as an all-star live band that included fellow Yeah Yeah Yeah’s bandmates Nick Zinner and Brian Chase, as well as Money Mark, Jason Grisell and Patrick Keeler, among others.While the full production, in all its glory, was certainly a spectacle to see, the real star of the show was, predictably, Karen O and the gorgeous song cycle composed of nine new, previously unreleased songs. Written some seven years earlier, it was the music that inspired the production from its inception. “Initially when we were recording the music, a lot of the music was influenced from film, and there’s a spatial element to the music that really lent itself to a rich visual language,” says Karen.Catch a brief taste of the production’s soundtrack in this WNYC interview with Karen O and Sam Spiegel, who along with Zinner served as co-musical director on the project. Karen O teams up with Jason Grisell to perform a heart-wrenching acoustic version of “Duet” (music starts around 11:30 in). Stay tuned because we’ll be releasing an exclusive documentary on the making of process, detailing how this wildly ambitious (and experimental) collaboration came together, in the coming weeks.
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Karen O Performs An Acoustic Song Off Stop The Virgens On WNYC
Karen O and Sam Spiegel stop by WNYC’s Soundcheck to discuss the Stop the Virgens and explain what, exactly, is a “psycho-opera.”