If you’re a musical composer, Broadway might get you a Tony Award — but it won’t get you 50 voices singing onstage. For that kind of scale, Jeanine Tesori, the Tony-winning composer of “Kimberly Akimbo” and “Fun Home,” opts for opera: Her latest, “Grounded,” has an orchestra of 80 and a cast of 60.
Grounded: All stories on one stage
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Based on the 2014 play starring Anne Hathaway in a 2015 Off Broadway run, “Grounded” marks Tesori’s Metropolitan Opera debut in a production directed by another theater-world crossover, Michael Mayer (“A Beautiful Noise,” the upcoming “Swept Away”). “When you have an orchestra of 80 people, the string section alone is unlike anything else,” Tesori said on the latest episode of “Stagecraft,” Variety’s theater podcast. “The reaction I got when I heard it … I’m so moved by it, just the sheer volume of people that you can’t get anywhere else.”
“Grounded,” written by Tesori and playwright-librettist George Brandt, follows a successful female pilot who is reassigned to operate combat drones used in wartime maneuvers on the other side of the world. That military setting, Tesori said, was one of the factors that made her think “Grounded” was more operatic than musical.
