ӣ����Ƶ

Miraculously, Union Avenue Opera’s 2025 mainstage season will take place, on schedule in July and August, at its home, Union Avenue Christian Church.

It’s surprising because on May 16, a terrifying, mile-wide EF-3 tornado tore through ӣ����Ƶ city, after a brief EF-0 warmup in Clayton. Cross-cutting Skinker-DeBaliviere and DeBaliviere Place, it beelined for historically redlined North ӣ����Ƶ, devastating neighborhoods including Academy, Lewis Place, Fountain Park, the Ville and Greater Ville, and O’Fallon. These African American neighborhoods suffered the worst impacts.

One of ӣ����Ƶ’ three opera companies, Union Avenue Opera, lives just barely on the North Side, in Visitation Park. The center of the tornado’s track passed about two blocks southeast of Union Avenue Christian Church where the opera performs. A block south across Delmar Boulevard, Westminster Presbyterian lost its entire roof and now looks like Notre-Dame de Paris did after its 2019 fire.

UAO’s church fared better, losing an expanse of roof and many windows, but not the sanctuary’s ceiling. General and Artistic Director Scott Schoonover recounts the damage. “It was a 60- by 25-foot gaping hole. The roof was gone. I mean, not just parts of it. The whole roof in that section, you could stick your head up there and see the steeple from the hole. And that’s right over the stage.”

Amazingly, though the Italian-manufactured roof tiles wait until 2026 to be replaced, the church managed to perform stabilizing repairs swiftly. “The initial pictures of the damage to the church were catastrophic. It’s just crazy how quickly it all came together,” says Schoonover, who also works as music director for the church.

“We were able to get the structural engineers in the week after the tornado, to get permission to hang the lighting grid—the lighting grid hangs off beams that are in the attic, but they’re not the beams that hold up the roof, which were the ones that were damaged. They’re the beams that hold up the ceiling which weren’t damaged. So yeah, we were lucky.”

UAO Administrative Director Emily Stolarski says the church community was crucial to fixing the building. “We’re ahead of schedule when it comes to the set build and loading everything, and the church has just been a great partner from the onset of the tornado. They jumped right in, and it felt like their focus was, how do we make the season happen? How do we protect the church? How do we make that process happen?”

So Union Avenue Opera’s season will proceed on July 5, opening with Lerner and Loewe’s 1956 musical, “My Fair Lady,” based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play “Pygmalion,” as well as Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard’s 1938 Oscar-winning film, named for the play. In recent years, UAO has performed a Broadway musical in most seasons. The last three Augusts saw Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” and “A Little Night Music,” and Flaherty’s “Ragtime.”

Schoonover tends a particular affinity for “My Fair Lady.” “It’s one of my favorite shows. In fact, it’s the first thing I ever music-directed back when I was 21. I worked at Northern Lights Playhouse up in Wisconsin for our summer stock, and we did ‘My Fair Lady’ and ‘The Sound of Music’ and ‘The King and I,’ all those in rep. And it was a crazy summer.”

Its musical style is more accessible to listeners than, say, Sondheim. Says Schoonover, “I just think the music is so much fun and it would be perfect at Union Avenue for many reasons. One of the things I like about it is it doesn’t have a ton of underscoring where it makes it difficult to hear the words being spoken when the orchestra’s playing under them.”

The well-known story traces the arc of Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney-speaking flower seller, whom Professor Henry Higgins attempts to “better” socially by teaching her to elocute Received Pronunciation — a standard English accent in Britain. The events begin as a bet between Higgins and his friend Colonel Pickering, but the show develops with rom-com dimensions.

Few shows depend so heavily on the female protagonist, and UAO has arranged a singer beloved to its audience, soprano Brooklyn Snow. Eliza is Snow’s sixth role with the company.

UAO loves Snow and she loves the company back: “It’s amazing because you actually get to know the audience — they’re amazing. They make a point to come and talk to me, and I love talking to people, and I’ve built relationships with a lot of the audience members. It almost feels like coming home because I feel so comfortable there.”

One of the great pleasures of following opera, and music in general, is watching superb young artists on their way up. Snow debuted with UAO in 2019, when she sang Cunégonde in Bernstein’s operetta “Candide.”

At that time, she impressed enough, but her development as a singer intensified after the pandemic, when for the 2021 season she delivered a vocally precise, theatrically hilarious performance as Olympia the doll in Offenbach’s “The Tales of Hoffmann” — under a circus tent, in a 104˚ parking lot, no less.

By 2022, Snow had become a regular at UAO, deploying that silvery timbre of hers in two widely divergent roles, Nannetta in Verdi’s last opera, “Falstaff,” and Anne Egerman in Sondheim’s best-known musical, “A Little Night Music.” The same technique that made Nannetta’s aria so pretty serves her well in Broadway, too.

“If you have technique, you can do anything, in my opinion. Even though it’s not an opera, I go into it with my same technique and embody the character. I truly love it, and I think what’s so fun about doing all this is that you become an actor first, and that helps influence the singing. And that’s why I love these crossover type shows because there is still legit singing in them, but you obviously also have to know how to act and move and present yourself on stage.”

Those acting chops are indispensable for Eliza Doolittle, who carries the whole show. Snow says, “She’s a complex character. She wants to be respected in society and is desperate to learn, and she really puts herself out there. I think she’s a very relatable character. And in the end, she gets what she wants. She set her mind to something, and she accomplished it.”

A lot of determination in the show, mirroring the determination it took for UAO’s season to survive the tornado.

“My Fair Lady” is just the beginning for UAO this summer. The second show (July 27-August 4) presents a double bill, pairing Leoncavallo’s landmark one-act verismo opera—and frequent Jeopardy! clue— “I Pagliacci,” not with its usual running mate, Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana,” but instead with Tom Cipullo’s operatic biopic “J�Dz����󾱲Ա�,” about ӣ����Ƶ native and Civil Rights icon Josephine Baker. Manna K. Jones plays the Black Venus, a nickname for Baker. Another UAO darling, Meroë Khalia Adeeb, appears as the at-risk soprano Nedda in “Pagliacci.”

Finally, dramatic soprano Kelly Slawson stars in the closing show (August 15-23), Richard Strauss’ messily erotic psychodrama, ��ٲ����dz���.” Slawson brings her colossal, steely instrument to the title role, opera’s foremost enfant terrible.

Owing to his orchestration and casting, Strauss is one of the most difficult opera composers for a smaller company to perform. But from disaster recovery to repertory, UAO is in the business of performing miracles. Says Schoonover of UACC’s parishioners, “They did it. They made it happen, and I’ll be eternally grateful that we were able to get all this done so quickly.”