TO THE MOON AND BEYOND

Plans at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica include a chamber opera, a digital illusionist, 11 local premieres and 17 artists new to the venue.

BY SHERRY STERN

WITH BIRDS IN the moon, illusion in a digital space and pride in advancing artistic endeavors, creativity carries on at the Broad Stage amid theater’s shifting landscape.

A key reason: The Broad Stage was well on a path toward change before the pandemic hit, according to Rob Bailis, its artistic and executive director. In fact, that’s what initially drew him to join the performing arts center on the Santa Monica College campus in June 2019.

“The Broad Stage already had a lot of overtones of social justice and of deep community engagement while remaining firmly an artistic institution,” Bailis says.

That sense of purpose guides both the theater’s revised 2020-21 season and its new urgency for planning 2022 and 2023.

Stay-at-home orders upended programming that Bailis says has been intended to celebrate the center’s renewed mission to strengthen its creative partnerships and engage diverse audiences.

“It was a really intense pivot to go from what I thought would be sort of this calling-card season to having to just immediately address the circumstances we were in,” he says.

Good fortune played a hand in two of the Broad Stage offerings. Birds in the Moon and illusionist Scott Silven managed to remain on the calendar with COVID-era tweaking.

Birds in the Moon is the world premiere of a chamber opera designed for outdoor spaces.

Performed on a mobile stage, the innovative opera will be presented free in several spots around Santa Monica. The tweaks: There will be more dates than originally planned; there will be smaller audiences, safely spaced apart.

The opera offers social engagement as well as social distancing. Written by Mark Grey and Júlia Canosa i Serra, Birds in the Moon is a tale of migration, a challenging environment and the search for a better life.

“The story in this some what bleak landscape has taken on an entirely new meaning now that we’re living in what we’re living in,” Bailis says.

It does take committing to a future rather than being panicked in the present.

—Rob Bailis, Broad Stage artistic and executive director

CELLIST YO-YO MA AND PHOTOGRAPHER AUSTIN MANN.

Another shift comes with the Los Angeles premiere of a new work by Silven, an illusionist, mentalist and performance artist whose well-reviewed touring show At the Illusionist’s Table had been planned for the coming season.

Instead, Silven has created The Journey, a Broad Stage co-commission designed specifically as an online show, with an initial run of ticketed performances Oct. 20-Nov. 1.

The in-theater season figures to roll out slowly with stage, dance and music programs beginning in January. Many of the earliest shows have the flexibility to switch to digital presentations or move to a later date.

The season—which features 11 Los Angeles premieres and 17 artists new to the Broad Stage— would unfold mostly on its main 500-seat Eli and Edythe Broad Stage or in its 100-seat blackbox theater, the Edye.

It also includes a multimedia project from cellist Yo-Yo Ma and photographer Austin Mann, the venue debut of Mark Morris Dance Group, the return of Grammy-winning musician Keb’ Mo’ and Och and Oy! A Considered Cabaret, with actor-singer Alan Cumming and NPR’s Ari Shapiro.

With 2021 scheduled, Bailis says, what’s essential now is to give artists the resources to keep working; the Broad has commissioned six major works for 2022 and 2023.

“We need to start asking what will artists need, what will communities need, what will the institutions that sustain us need at that time,” Bailis says.

“It does take committing to a future rather than being panicked in the present.”

KEB’ MO’.