UA Opera Theater presents its fall production featuring, "The Crucible," an
opera by Robert Ward. Two performances will be offered in Crowder Hall, Friday
November 20 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, November 22 at 3:00 p.m.

Based on the play by Arthur Miller about the 1692 Salem witch trials, the opera
is sung in English and features outstanding graduate students as the lead
roles. This work surely is one of the outstanding American operas written
during the last century. Stage direction is under UA Opera Theater director
Charles Roe, and music director Thomas Cockrell conducts the Arizona Symphony
Orchestra.

About the music, Maestro Cockrell states, "Robert Ward's Pulitzer Prize winning
score is a great example of the American school of composition from the post
WWII era that followed the lead of Aaron Copland. In Ward's music we sometimes
hear the lyricism of Puccini or the pungency of Prokofiev but always his strong
knowledge of operatic tradition married to his distinctive American voice. That
the playwright Arthur Miller chose to work with Ward and the librettist,
Bernard Stambler, shows that he felt these men would do honor to this
tremendously popular and important play."