This month, the College of Southern Nevada’s Nicholas J. Horn Theater at the North Las Vegas campus will host a student-driven production unlike anything the school’s music program has ever created before.
What a Wonderful Year 2020 Will Be is an original opera written by 27-year department head Dr. Mark Wherry, a comedic musical inspired by relatable pandemic-era absurdities. Each of the four performances will be a collaboration between CSN’s music, theater and dance programs, with theater students designing costumes, dance students creating original choreography and staging, and music students singing and playing along with some faculty members in a small chamber orchestra.
“It’s been wonderful, because everyone has chipped in with these great efforts,” Wherry says. “Our dance professor, Denise Darnell, has been working with my singing students, who aren’t dancers, and she’s been great. And one of our theater professors, Dustin Shaffer, is helping on the technical end and with stage managing. It’s been a really nice synergy of all the fine arts departments.”
If operatic music seems too challenging for most collegiate artists, it is. “I’ve never had a tenor that could pop out repeated high Cs like you’d expect in a Puccini opera,” Wherry says. “But when I started to write, I geared the music to be … a little more accessible.” That approach was beneficial for the composer, too, since Wherry had never written an opera before. And it could be the first operatic experience for many in the audience, although local nonprofit company Opera Las Vegas has performed at Horn Theater over the years.
For What A Wonderful Year, keeping it light is just as important as sounding great onstage. In recent years, Wherry has collaborated with Zombie Burlesque star Enoch Augustus Scott on the comedic quartet Baritones of Love, among other projects.
Writing humorous songs is kind of Wherry’s thing, and the evolution of the opera moved organically into the comedy category.
The original inspirations were the regular human problems—some serious, some completely ridiculous—we all dealt with during the stay-at-home early months of the COVID era. “Stuff like, what would happen if I stood up and didn’t have any pants on during a Zoom meeting,” Wherry says. “That didn’t happen to me, but I did have one student who, during an online class, turned the camera on and his mother was standing behind him wearing only a towel. That was a jumping-off point for one of the songs.”
And who didn’t worry about their daughter falling in love with the Amazon delivery man, simply because he was the only guy around? That inspired the aptly named song “Next to You.”
If you’re ready to laugh at our collective recent trials and tribulations—yes, buying toilet paper at Costco will be addressed—and you’re ready for an entirely new form of entertainment from CSN, what a wonderful show this could be.
WHAT A WONDERFUL YEAR 2020 WILL BE November 4-5, 10 & 12, 7 p.m., $10. Horn Theater at CSN’s North Las Vegas campus, csn.edu/pac.
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