The cast of “Crescent City” romping on the junk heap (Credit: Asher Kelman)

So I was supposed to write an article for LA Weekly about this new experimental opera called Crescent City—and then, at the last minute, I wasn’t. My article got “killed,” as we journalists like to say, to make these incidents sound more melodramatic than they are. It’s unfortunate, but you move on.

My editor was nice enough to release the article back to me, so I’m free to post the whole thing here. Crescent City opens tonight (May 10) and runs through May 27. More info and tickets available here.

From atop a large piece of scaffolding he has dubbed the “skybox,” Yuval Sharon looks out over his dream space: a 12,000-square-foot warehouse at Atwater Crossing that will soon host Crescent City, the debut production from Sharon’s new opera company, The Industry.

Beneath him, carpenters, stagehands and visual artists scurry over the six massive art installations that fill nearly every available inch of the warehouse, forming Crescent City’s set. Hammers pound and circular saws buzz. Sharon gazes over it all from on high like a benevolent deity, clearly enjoying the crackle of deadline-driven energy that fills the room. The show opens in 10 days.

“We were hunting for spaces starting in June of last year,” the 32-year-old director says with a broad smile, his default expression. “It was an ordeal. We even put an option on a spot that didn’t have any bathrooms.” He laughs, remembering serious discussions of sending audience and cast members to the bar across street. “We must have been completely insane.”

Insane would be one way to describe the preparation that has gone into Crescent City, an epic work by composer Anne LeBaron and librettist Douglas Kearney that has been over six years in the making. This, its first full production, will feature a cast of 18, a 16-piece orchestra, four video projection screens and, perhaps most impressively, the six huge installations, each designed by a different visual artist to represent different corners of the opera’s mythic world. Among the more striking: Alice Könitz’s “swamp,” a black semi-circle of jagged, glittering spires, and Katie Grinnan’s “junk heap,” which resembles the rubble of an exploded Andy Warhol museum, with colorful photograms wrapped and twisted around a towering pile of uneven platforms that the performers must clamber over like kids on a jungle gym. “They’ve been calling it the Crescent City workout,” Sharon jokes.

LeBaron’s “hyperopera,” which mixes electronic and acoustic instrumentation to tell the story of a hurricane-stricken city and its would-be savior, the voodoo queen Marie Laveau, demanded an unconventional production from the start. Sharon is determined to give it one—and in doing so, he hopes to change people’s attitudes about what an opera can be.

“Opera, unfortunately, has taken on a lot of baggage over the years,” says Sharon, sipping coffee on the patio of Atwater Crossing’s café (yes, they have bathrooms, too). “My own belief…is the way to get people back into quote-unquote ‘old opera’ or traditional opera is really through the new.”

In addition to LeBaron’s experimental score and those imposing, abstract installations, Crescent City will also challenge the audience’s expectations by asking most of them to wander through the space on foot, watching the action unfold from a walking path extending around the warehouse’s perimeter. Others will be seated in Sharon’s “skybox” and even throughout the set itself. What they can’t see directly they’ll watch unfold on four huge video screens.

“I like the audience to always be aware of themselves as audience members,” says Sharon, who moved to L.A. from New York to start The Industry just two years ago. “But not in a way that’s passive. It’s a challenging position, because where do you look? Where is the central action? Do I walk past people that might be leaning against the wall? The interaction between audience members I’m really, really interested in.”

Wherever they’re watching from, audience members will be seeing something “not typically done” in experimental theater, according to LeBaron. “It’s kind of unheard of, to do something on this scale without a large organization behind it. It’s like an offering to the city of Los Angeles.”