Hunky Pin-Up Guys in Young Vic's HMS Pinafore

CJ Hartung, Joshua Hughes, Jeffrey Williams, John Kaneklides, and with flag (L-R)

Who says that Gilbert & Sullivan can't be sexy? The Young Victorian Theatre Company has assembled a cast of three barihunks and a hunkentenor for their current run of Gilbert and Sullivan's HMS Pinafore. The pin-up worthy cast includes barihunk Joshua Hughes as Sir Joseph Porter, KCB, First Lord of the Admiralty; barihunk Jeffrey Williams as Captain Corcoran, Commander of the HMS Pinafore; hunkentenor John Kaneklides as Ralph Rackstraw; and, bass-barihunk Christopher "CJ" Hartung as Dick Deadeye.

The show has already proved to be a huge box office success, as Saturday's opening night performance and today's matinee both completely sold out. Fortunately for anyone near the Baltimore/Washington D.C. area, there are three remaining performances on July 20, 22, and 23 at the Sinex Theater in the Roland Park area.

Joshua Hughes, graduated with a Master of Music in Voice Performance from the Peabody Conservatory, and previously appeared in the company's 2016 summer production of Iolanthe. He recently performed in Charpentier's Les Arts Florissants and Purcell's The Fairy Queen with Dallas Bach Society.

Jeffrey Williams and cast

Jeffrey Williams, who won the Middle/East Tennessee District of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, will be appearing next season with the Nashville Opera in both Puccini's Tosca and Hercules vs Vampires. He is also an Assistant Professor of Voice at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee.

CJ Hartung is a student at the Peabody Conservatory of Music and is a regular young artist with the Berk's Opera Company, where he most recently sang the role of Lodovico in Verdi's Otello.

John Kaneklides has been singing both opera and musical theater, having performed Henrik in Sondheim's A Little Night Music and Tony in Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story. This season he made his role debut in Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann with the St. Petersburg Opera, where he performed the title role.

Tickets for the remaining shows are available online.

Aaron Sørensen in 2 world premieres; Reprising Osmin in Baltimore

Aaron Sørensen's barihunk photo shoot

Bass-barihunk Aaron Sørensen has had an interesting beginning to the new year, performing two world premieres and his second Osmin.

He just released a song cycle by four-time Emmy Award-winning composer Glen Roven that was written with his voice in mind. The original song cycle is based on wine tasting notes from Obsidian Ridge Winery in Sonoma, California that were penned by winemaker Alex Beloz. The text screams for music with phraes like "dancing on the palate" and "a full crescendo of stony tannins." Only Sørensen's rich, deep base could do justice words like "dark hibiscus" which almost demands to be written for the lowest reaches of the human voice.

The song cycle will be premiered at the winery on June 20th and we'll have more details in a future post. There was also a video of the songs taped at Henry's Restaurant in New York City, which you can watch below. The video was directed by the gifted opera director John De Los Santos.

The former Barihunks calendar model also just sang in the world premiere of  Gregory Vajda’s comic opera Georgia Bottoms with fellow barihunk Mike Nyby and the Huntsville Symphony. The opera about the modern South, is based on the national best-seller by Alabama author Mark Childress.

On March 7th he'll sing his second performance of Osmin in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail with the Peabody Opera Theatre in Baltimore. Osmin was Sørensen's dream role and he just debuted it with the Houston Symphony last month. The Peabody performance will be directed by Garnett Bruce, who directed their successful Rake's Progress in 2011.

The opera will be performed at the Modell Performing Arts Center in Baltimore and tickets are available online.

Nathan Wyatt as Bobby Kennedy in new opera

Nathan Wyatt as Bobby Kennedy and Caitlin Vincent as Jackie Kennedy (Photo: Britt Olsen-Ecker)

Nathan Wyatt is new to this site and we discovered him singing the role of Robert Kennedy in the world premiere of Joshua Bornfield's Camelot Requiem. The North Carolina native has been involved with a number of world premieres lately including, Jake Heggie’s “Epilogue: Under the Blessing of your Psyche Wings,” as part of the Opera America Songbook, and William Bolcom’s “Gettysburg, July 1, 1863,” a commission by SongFest.

Camelot Requiem was commissioned by Baltimore’s Figaro Project in honor of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The opera tells the story of Jackie Kennedy and the small group who surrounded her immediately after the President’s death in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Caitlin Vincent's libretto is drawn from the written history of the event, as well as the traditional requiem mass.

Nathan Wyatt sings William Bolcom’s “Gettysburg, July 1, 1863”

North Carolina native Nathan Wyatt is a recent graduate of the Peabody Conservatory. He was awarded a Tanglewood Music Festival Fellowship for the summer of 2013. In September, Wyatt was one of two invited soloists, along with soprano Elizabeth Futral, to perform new works in the official opening and ribbon-cutting ceremony of the new Opera America National Opera Center in New York.

Nathan Wyatt

He received first place honors in the Maryland/DC chapter of the National Association of Teachers of Singing and was a finalist in the Sylvia Green Competition in 2010.  Recent opera roles include Alexander Kerensky in the world premiere of Joshua Bornfield’s Strong like Bull, Le Directeur and Le Gendarme in Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Figaro in Le nozze di Figaro, Lescaut in Manon, Guglielmo in Cosi fan tutte, and The Forester in The Adventures of Sharp-Ears the Vixen.  

In the fall of 2011, Mr. Wyatt made is Carnegie Hall debut under the direction of Marin Alsop in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s production of Arthur Honneger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher.