New for 2022 is Live!!! A Roadkill Opera, with the greatest performances from the six fully staged live performances of A Roadkill Opera. Watch for announcements once we find out (fingers crossed) if the full 75-minute film is accepted for screening at 2022 or 2023 film festivals.
Live!!! A Roadkill Opera has been submitted to film festivals under feature, music, comedy, and opera categories.
A Roadkill Opera had its first workshop performance on June 9 at Artomatic 2012 in Crystal City, Virginia. The intertwined history of Artomatic and A Roadkill Opera was told in a 60-minute livestream as part of Artomatic‘s 20th anniversary in 2020. Jeffrey Dokken, Stephan Alexander Parker, & A Roadkill Opera has been repackaged for consideration for showing in film festivals in 2022 and 2023. The repackaged documentary will be released in 2023.
See the trailers for the Artomatic 2020 livestream and the new feature film under consideration for film festivals in 2023!!
Incorporating photos and footage from live performances 1988 – 2016, with new footage contributed in August 2020 by Jeffrey Dokken, Stephan Alexander Parker, Jaylen S. Johnson, Val Rauch, Michael Thompson, Tanya Whisnant, and Christina Giles,Jeffrey Dokken, Stephan Alexander Parker, & A Roadkill Opera at Artomatic 2020 streamed live on Aug 15, 2020.
A Roadkill Opera was first prototyped as a script and mockup at Artomatic 2004 and workshopped at Artomatic 2012. From Artomatic 2012 we went into the studio—the commercially released recording got the creative team invited to the GRAMMYs in 2015, where we received a surprise announcement that the Symphony Orchestra of Northern Virginia (SONOVA) would perform it the following year.
Jeffrey Dokken conducted the Symphony Orchestra of Northern Virginia (SONOVA) on October 21, 2016, at the James Lee Community Theater in Falls Church, Virginia; and conducted other groups in January 2016 at the Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint in Washington, DC; in studio recordings at Blue House Productions in Kensington, Maryland, between January and June 2013; and at Artomatic 2012 in Crystal City, Virginia, in June 2012.
Music composed by Ferdinando Paer for Leonora (1804) was repurposed by Stephan Alexander Parker for this fast, funny mashup of classical music and a backstage screwball comedy about the hour before the first professional gig for the rude mechanicals of an amateur improv comedy troupe, the Roadkill on A Stick Frozen Foods Theatre Company, in 1988 Jackson Hole, Wyoming. New interviews conducted in August 2020 are mixed with archival photos, a bit of narration over the live, October 2016 Overture, and live performance footage from all the above with footage from the March 13, 1992, Roadkill!!! Greatest Hits! performance at the Pink Garter Theatre in Jackson, Wyoming.
So excited! None of this would have happened without Artomatic, SONOVA, Ed Bachtel, and Maestro Jeffrey Dokken!