WHY YOU SHOULD CARE: Because the cultural life of a people marks the width and breadth of their ascent from the muck. Plus she can kill you with eight bars of “Danny Boy”, fer chrissakes.

Opera? Yawn. This isn’t a music appreciation course; it’s Saturday night, your precious time off, time to have fun, which, the way you see it, means no opera.

But then you haven’t experienced Alicia Hall Moran, the classically trained, genre-busting singer who, yes, has loved opera since she was a little girl growing up in Stamford, Connecticut, where she would improvise music for her playdates as they unfolded. Sure, she might look like your traditional opera singer when she performs in a floor-length gown, but peek at the musicians behind her. In place of an orchestra, she’s backed by a culture-bending band that often includes a jazz pianist (Jason Moran, her husband and the Kennedy Center’s artistic director for jazz), taiko drummer Kaoru Watanabe, and an electric bass player.

And what’s that she singing? Definitely not your mother’s Madame Butterfly. It could be Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder or the Supremes if you’re catching a performance of her Motown Project, where the drama and intensity of opera and soulful lyricism of Motown collide (like here, in this fan-waving version of “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” http://vimeo.com/17657782). 

This work of alchemy isn’t any smooth marketing move for the mezzo-soprano, a way to draw in larger audiences —even though it has done just that, with sold-out shows in Manhattan, Philadelphia, Boston and other cities. But rather it comes from her desire to do music the way that she wants to do it. She loves opera, she loves soul music, she loves improvisation and — once she got her master’s from Manhattan School of Music — she had the skills to figure out how to combine them.

And after spending last year on Broadway in Porgy & Bess (as Audra McDonald’s understudy for Bess and in the ensemble), the mom of twin four-year-olds realized she also had the courage. “Doing Broadway every day is like being in the Olympics,” she says. “I learned to do a vault on a jacked-up ankle and nail that thing!”


Hall Moran isn’t much concerned with people’s preconceived ideas that opera is stuffy and old-timey. Because what she’s doing is the exact opposite of all that. Whatever you think opera — or for that matter, Motown —sounds like, this risk-taker will transcend your every expectation. She’s not interested in defining or being confined to a particular genre; instead she’s syncing past and present, classical and contemporary to make a heady artistic brew. Take a sip. Puccini never tasted so good.