'Albert Herring'

For a week in mid-February, the Harvard community will have one more way to witness the exchange of virtue for self-liberation—and this time it won’t just be your roommate shaking off the January blues. Instead, this spectacle comes in the form of a comic, irreverent tale of innocence lost and knowledge gained: the Dunster House Opera’s upcoming production of Benjamin Britten’s “Albert Herring.”

The opera tells the story of an English town that, frustrated in its unsuccessful attempts to find a girl virginal enough to wear the May Queen’s crown, decides to give the position to the timid and naïve Albert Herring. This unexpected turn sets off a series of capers that tests Albert’s virtue and the community’s values.

Stage director Stewart N. Kramer ’12 hopes “Albert Herring” will resonate with audiences at Harvard. “It’s an opera that is very much about young people, about the experience of being young. Even though most of the characters are older, the entire crisis is about youth and lost youth,” Kramer says.

It is also a genuinely comic opera by Britten, one of the 20th century’s greatest composers who is best known for his expansive and probing works. Librettist Eric Cozier’s English-language text is “highly conversational” and “very funny,” Kramer adds.

Yet Zander J. MacQuitty ’10, who plays the titular role, believes the show’s appeal rests most firmly on its universality. “Everyone sees themselves in Albert,” he says.

—Julian B. Gewirtz