Two Local Youth Ensembles Put an Operatic Spin on ‘Grease’

When it comes to making 18th-century opera relatable for teenagers, soprano Sarah Cullins has got it dialed in. The Opera Company of Middlebury‘s general, education and outreach director, who founded and leads its Youth Opera Company, has recast the most famous songs from five of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s operas as a version of Grease — best known from the 1978 film starring John Travolta and now a popular school musical.

Never mind that “Là ci darem la mano,” from Don Giovanni, will have a whole new meaning in the context of Dear Diary, as Cullins’ opera remix is titled. The point is that the work allows eight Youth Opera Company high schoolers from around the state to sing arias, duets and possibly the most beautiful trio ever composed — no pressure — while being backed by a cadre of their peers: 15 chamber musicians from the Vermont Youth Orchestra.

The two groups’ joint performance happens on Friday, April 11, at the Elley-Long Music Center in Colchester. (The singers will repeat Dear Diary with music director Mary Jane Austin on piano accompaniment on Saturday, April 12, in Waterbury and Sunday, April 13, in Middlebury.)

It’s the first collaboration of the groups, with the orchestral musicians learning to switch gears to accompaniment and the singers tackling the unfamiliarity of taking cues from, and projecting over, an orchestra.

Cullins, recently hampered by laryngitis, indicated during a text exchange that she hit on the idea for Dear Diary while rethinking the “icky” title character of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, a promiscuous nobleman; and the unlucky Zerlina, a peasant he cynically seduces on the eve of her wedding.

“I started imagining the high school versions of [them as] the star quarterback and [the girl who’s] not from the rich, popular crowd,” Cullins, 51, wrote, “and how they might even be consulting with their peeps while singing their duet. It started to remind me of Grease.”

The singers will sing in Italian without supertitles, but in a nod to a Grease scene, they’ll read their diary entries aloud in English between songs to help audiences follow the plot. The story centers on two groups of high school seniors, the mutually antagonistic Greasers and Ivies, who are grappling with what to do after graduation. One Ivy boy gets into the West Point military academy, his first choice, while a Greaser is being forced to go there by his parents. Despite their differences, the two groups find common ground in the fear and excitement of looming life changes.

“The West Point theme came about because we included the Così fan tutte quintet [‘Sento, o Dio, che questo piede’] in which Ferrando and Guglielmo pretend to go off to war,” Cullins explained. It was also a way to work in the bass aria “Non più andrai” from The Marriage of Figaro, in which Count Almaviva tells Cherubino that he must man up and be a soldier.

The aforementioned trio from Così, “Soave sia il vento,” ends the show “with its message of hope for gentle winds that bring everyone’s wishes to fruition,” Cullins wrote.

“It’s a really well-structured plot considering the [range of] songs we have,” said mezzo-soprano Elsie Pawul, 18, one of two actual seniors in the cast. Pawul lives in Waitsfield and Bristol and attends Harwood Union High School, where she had already learned to sing over an orchestra in musical theater productions.

In Dear Diary, Pawul sings the character of Marcy, a Greaser who, she said, is “a little sarcastic but has an underlying want for everything to stay the same” as she watches her friends go off to college.

Pawul credited Cullins with teaching her to be as expressive in Italian as in English, mainly through acting. “There are tons of big gestures and a lot of exaggerated consonants in specific parts,” she said — particularly in her duet “Via resti servita” from Figaro, in which she mock-politely tries to pass a more sincere Ivy girl through a door.

Pawul learned of the Youth Opera Company during her sophomore year. “Up to that point,” she said, “opera seemed big and adult-like. I thought there was no way I could do it. I was intimidated. Now I feel like it’s not as hard and scary as it seems.”

In fact, she plans to study either voice or musical theater in college and has been accepted to all the programs to which she applied. (Berklee College of Music in Boston is a top choice.)

Pawul will join at least 10 YOC alums who have chosen to study the discipline in college — a fair number for a program only in its seventh year. While proud, Cullins wrote, “I don’t see the goal of the program as necessarily producing more future professional musicians as much as lifelong music and opera lovers.”

The collaboration between the Youth Opera and the Youth Orchestra makes so much sense that one wonders why it wasn’t done before. According to VYOA executive director Rosina Cannizzaro, who will play timpani with the student musicians, the timing was right: VYO music director Mark Alpízar, now in his fifth year, has spent the past year developing chamber groups. The Dear Diary orchestra will include three of those groups — a string quartet, a string trio and a wind quintet — making it easier for the singers to project over a limited orchestra.

Alpízar, who earned his doctorate in both orchestra and opera conducting, said Cullins’ story is “really fun,” and “the idea that there’s anxiety about what happens after high school resonates with all the musicians. Seeing that produced with Mozart, and seeing that Mozart is timeless, is a fantastic idea.”

The musicians’ reactions to opera music have varied widely, he added. “Some have said, in very Gen Z fashion, that Mozart is the GOAT,” he said. “Some say they’ve cooled to Mozart — they’ve played him too much; others like the passion of Romantic music, and they’ve recognized that Mozart can be just as Romantic.”

Alpízar also had fun explaining the plots of operas such as Don Giovanni, where the title character gets dragged down to hell for his sins at the end. “They just stared at me wide-eyed, like, ‘Operas are that crazy?’ I’m like, ‘Yes, they are,'” he recalled with a chuckle.

French hornist Naomi Shpaner, 17, a junior at Colchester High School who is in her third year with the VYO, already knew some of Mozart’s songs but had never accompanied singers.

“It’s definitely a lot more pressure because we don’t want to mess [them] up,” Shpaner said. “Like, if I played the wrong part, it could throw them off because they’re kind of depending on the orchestra to hear their pitches. Hopefully not, because they’re very good.”

Asked if she ever listened to opera, Shpaner said, “Usually, when opera comes on Vermont Public, I just turn it off, but now I’m not going to. It’s more interesting than I thought.”

This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2025.

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