Aliens Invade the Kent Concert Hall

Utah State University’s Caine College of the Arts opera theatre students need help stopping the Globolinks from attacking a school bus full of children!

Audiences can see what happens during the performance of Help, Help the Globolinks! March 28 at 2 and 7 p.m. in the Kent Concert Hall at the Chase Fine Arts Center on USU’s Logan campus.

The opera is directed by guest Stefan Espinosa.

“I’m directing this show for several reasons, the first and foremost being my admiration for Dallas Heaton, the director of the opera program in the CCA,” Espinosa, a professional actor and director, said. “The other reason I am directing is because I fell in love with the material. It’s a perfect example of the sci-fi, B-movie style of the 1960s, but everything is sung through. Who couldn’t love an opera about invading aliens?”

In the opera, a bus full of children returning to school from vacation stalls unexpectedly and is soon surrounded by Globolinks — powerful aliens who are invading Earth. The children soon discover that music keeps the aliens away, so Emily, the only child who took her violin home to practice, bravely goes off alone to get help. The teachers worry about the students’ delay so they come to save them and then set off to find Emily. The principal is able to save her in a final gesture of kindness before he transforms into a Globolink and flies away.

“When Gian Carlo Menotti was writing this opera in the late ‘60s, he was arguably writing in response to the sudden ‘invasion’ (and incredible popularity) of electronic music,” Espinosa said. “His premise that aliens called ‘Globolinks’ suddenly invade the Earth, communicating in electronic noises and vulnerable to nothing but music is simply brilliant. The students are helpless to fight them off because all of them left their instruments at school over the break, neglecting to take them home to practice as they were instructed. Only one smart and brave little girl has her violin with her, and she is sent on a quest for help, alone through the Globolink infested woods.”

Menotti’s message in this play, though intentionally overstated, is still a good one. We must not forget the value and power of music in our lives, or suffer the consequences that a life centered around machinery can bring, said Espinosa.

“While Menotti was writing in reference to the electronic menaces of his day, the technology of today far surpasses Menotti’s wildest fantasies,” Espinosa said. “I wanted to highlight Menotti’s message and bring it into our modern sensibilities by incorporating as many current electronics as possible, and create a link between the Globolinks and our Wi-Fi centered lifestyles of today. It would be hard to argue that we aren’t all, to some degree, slaves to our electronics.”

Espinosa will use Menotti’s basic message and adapt it to argue that music and art are the true languages of the soul, and we are in danger of letting our screens consume us, distract us from what is real and what really matters in life.

Tickets are $10 adults, $8 youth and seniors, $5 USU faculty and staff and free for USU students with ID. For more information, visit the CCA Box Office in room L101 of the Chase Fine Arts Center, call 435-797-8022 or see the college’s Production Services website.

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Writer and contact: Whitney Schulte, 435-797-9203, whitney.schulte@usu.edu