Music by Annie Gosfield
Produced by Los Angeles Philharmonic
Co-produced by The Industry and NOW Art

Walt Disney Concert Hall
World Premiere
Los Angeles, California
November 2017

Concept, Direction, Text adaptation: Yuval Sharon
Conductor: Christopher Rountree
Production Designer: Calder Greenwood

Inspired by the disruption of consensus reality presented by the proliferation of fake news in the mid-2010s, and Orson Welles’s infamous 1938 radio drama of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds—in which the actor delivered a pseudojournalistic account so convincing that some listeners earnestly believed that the Earth was being attacked— Yuval Sharon created a new opera adaptation of The War of the Worlds in 2017. Produced by The Industry, the LA Phil, and Now Art, and with music by Annie Gosfield, Sharon’s world premiere production eliminated the boundary between the concert hall and the streets of Los Angeles by expanding the action well beyond Walt Disney Concert Hall.

In a nod to Welles’s character—an on-air radio DJ whose between-song commentary becomes a play-by-play of the apocalypse—The War of the Worlds featured an intro and running commentary by Sigourney Weaver, portraying herself as the celebrity emcee of an LA Phil concert interrupted by an alien invasion. Speaking to audiences from the safety of Walt Disney Concert Hall, Weaver relayed reports from three other locations throughout Los Angeles, where alien destruction—represented by large-scale puppets and live aria performances—took place before audiences on the street. Using three defunct air raid sirens to broadcast the performance from within the hall, and the hall’s sound system to transmit arias from outside, War of the Worlds reimagined opera as a coordinated, city-wide happening.

Photography provided courtesy of the LA Phil.