OutSFL’s Out & Proud List
Stephen has been featured in Out South Florida‘s “Out & Proud” list for 2024 for his work as an “Operatic Visionary”.
Between Two Palms
Monday, February 10, 2025 6:00PM
The continuation of our series of intimate conversations between award-winning art- makers from the performing, visual and literary arts and Artistic Associates of The Studios of Key West. I will be chatting with Mike Rezendes the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and member of the Boston Globe‘s “Spotlight” team which exposed the Roman Catholic clergy sexual abuse scandal. Now a member of the Global Investigative Team at the Associated Press, he comes to Key West to talk with me about his work as an investigative journalist, screenwriter and Jimmy Breslin’s biographer.
Friends of the Key West Library Speaker Series
Monday, March 10, 2025 6:00PM
I’ve been invited to join a roster of writers and journalists to talk about the creative process of adapting works of fiction for the opera stage. My presentation will include a discussion of methodologies for employing structure and concision to the libretto, as well as determining which dynamic moments will allow the composer’s music to tell the story. I’ll use examples from A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), music by Sheila Silver, adapted from the novel by Khaled Hosseini, The Wooden Sword, music by Sheila Silver, adapted from Folktext (2001), traditions of the Jewish diaspora, and Swimming in the Dark (2020), music by Martin Hennessy, adapted from the novel by Tomasz Jedrowski.
Swimming in the Dark
Act One Concert Development Workshop
Music by Martin Hennessy
Libretto By Stephen Kitsakos
Directed by Michael Shell
Conducted by Tyler Readinger
Friday, March 21, 2025
Saturday, March 22, 2025
The Helmerich Theater at The Studios of Key West
Adapted from the international bestselling novel by Tomasz Jedrowski, and named a top 20 LGBTQ book for 2020 by NPR, The Guardian, O Magazine, Publishers Weekly & the New York Review of Books, Swimming in the Dark is an opera about choice and political freedom set in Poland in 1980. At its center is a story of two young men, Ludwik and Janusz, who meet one summer after graduating from college and bond over their discovery of the American novelist James Baldwin’s seminal work of gay & bisexual literature, Giovanni’s Room. With soaring melodies and a moving libretto, this tale of subversion, entrapment and identity set against the beauty and rapture of the Polish countryside at the rise of the Solidarity movement, is sure to resonate with American audiences.
The Studios of Key West has partnered with the Jacobs School of Music, Ballet & Opera, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, to present a developmental workshop of the complete Act One (80”). The concert-staged workshop will include 18 guest artists from Indiana and New York. It is a continuation of a developmental workshop begun in January, 2024 and presented at Auer Hall on the campus of Indiana University.
