‘10 Days in a Madhouse’ to premiere next season at Opera Philadelphia

Opera Philadelphia has announced its 2023-2024 season, beginning in September with a kickoff Festival O23 featuring a world premiere.

“10 Days in a Madhouse” is based on the 1887 book by the groundbreaking journalist Nellie Bly, who faked insanity so that she would be committed to a New York City mental asylum. Undercover as a patient, Bly reported widespread abuses, forced incarceration, and systemic misdiagnosis of women from inside the Women’s Lunatic Asylum at Blackwell’s Island in New York, now called Roosevelt Island.

The opera, written by the recent Curtis Institute of Music graduate Rene Orth, is composed for both acoustic and electronic elements to make Bly’s observations from 136 years ago relevant to contemporary audiences, said Opera Philadelphia director David Devan.

“It’s about our lives today,” he said. “It’s for us as an opera company wanting to make sure that opera has 21st century fingerprints on it.”

Bly — who also famously traveled around the world in 72 days besting Jules Verne’s fictional novel “Around the World in 80 Days” — was one of the first female investigative journalists. Her reporting from Blackwell’s Island prompted a grand jury investigation into the asylum, and ultimately changes to how it was funded and operated.

As shown in “Hidden Voices,” the recent exhibition at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the mistreatment of women for reasons of insanity — often misdiagnosed — was not isolated to Blackwell’s Island, but was widespread in mental health institutions across the United States.

“Our opera explores that,” said Devan, who co-commissioned the opera with Tapestry Opera in Toronto. “It’s written and developed by an all-woman team who are standing firm and proud in their life experiences and identities in telling the story.”

Next fall’s O23 festival will also feature the Philadelphia premiere of “Unholy Wars,” a staging of classic Baroque opera songs sung from a contemporary Arab-American perspective. And Giuseppe Verdi’s “Simon Boccanegra,” an opera about manipulative politics and romance in the Italian city of Genoa. It stars baritones Quinn Kelsey and Christian Van Horn, and soprano Ana María Martínez

“The reason that Boccanegra happened is, it was a perfect opportunity for Quinn and Ana María and Christian to be singing together,” Devan said. “These world-class artists working with Corrado [Rovaris, music director]. It emerged from that.”

Later next season, Opera Philadelphia will stage a version of “Madame Butterfly,” an opera often seen as problematic for its sexualized portrayal of Japanese women and girls. This production by Aria Umezawa “deconstructs” Puccini’s fantasy opera by centering women and Asian perspectives, and making obvious the Western cultural lens through which the opera was written.

Devan said the new season was programmed with the idea of advancing and evolving the standard opera repertoire.

“We’ve come into a position of leadership in our field and in our city through that sort of progressive stance,” he said. “We get people coming to us all the time with their most urgent, fabulous, and crazy ideas. We just wanted to be a place where, you know, the most creative folks would want to come and try to find a home for their work here.”