Julia Adolphe’s “A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears”

With A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears, composer of notable choral, orchestral, operatic, chamber, and art song pieces Julia Adolphe, librettist Stephanie Fleischmann, and director Elkhanah Pulitzer adapt Jules Feiffer’s loopy fairytale about Izzy, a young royal, doomed to make everyone around her laugh so hard that nothing gets done in her presence into an opera for audiences of all ages. The quest Izzy undertakes to cure her affliction takes her on a journey that tests notions of friendship, identity, and love while also challenging conventional gender roles and their relationships to the standard archetypes found in fables.

Illustration by Jules Feiffer.