The Dramatist Spring 2025: Commissions
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Business and Career
Opera Commissions: Sorting Out the Confusion
Mar 01, 2025
Business and Career
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As writers and composers of musicals know all too well, seldom will they earn a plug nickel for all their years of conceptualizing, developing, and refining new shows—not until a ticket-buying audience takes its seats as the curtain rises on the first paid public performance. Like it or not, that’s the system, and the rationalization for it is that if the show is an enormous hit and gets licensed for future productions, the bonanza of income will more than compensate the creators for their years of deprivation and scrounging to make ends meet.

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Photo of Deborah Brevoort
Deborah Brevoort

writes plays, musicals, and opera libretti. She’s best known for her play The Women of Lockerbie, produced internationally. A winner of the Campbell Opera Librettist prize, she has written ten opera libretti commissioned and produced by Glimmerglass, Chicago Opera Theater, Cincinnati Opera, Ft. Worth, and others. She is a Fulbright Specialist in opera and theatre with the US State Dept and recently led an opera writing workshop at the Seoul Institute for the Arts.

Michael Korie
Michael Korie

co-chairs the DG Opera Committee with Deborah Brevoort. His opera libretti include the upcoming Harvey Milk Reimagined, composer Stewart Wallace, at Opera Parallele in San Francisco this spring, and The Grapes of Wrath, composer Ricky Ian Gordon, presented in concert recently at Carnegie Hall. Korie’s lyrics to musicals include the Broadway productions of War Paint and Grey Gardens, composer Scott Frankel. He received the Marc Blitzstein Award from the American Academy of Arts for his work in both musical theatre and opera.

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