Teatro Grattacielo’s America 250 double bill brings together two powerful explorations of freedom — one civic, one personal — created for the national commemoration marking 250 years since the founding of the United States. Jefferson Lives!, a new commission - world premiere opera, examines the birth of the American Revolution not as distant history but as lived human experience. Through the ghostly presence of John Adams and a modern Narrator drawn unwillingly into the past, the opera traces how political ideas move from thought into action, revealing the moral pressure, doubt, and consequence behind America’s revolutionary awakening.

Paired with Puccini’s Suor Angelica, which turns inward to explore spiritual confinement and the cost of enforced silence, the evening asks a shared question: what does it mean to seek freedom within systems far larger than ourselves? An empire tightening its grip; a convent demanding obedience — each becomes the space where inner conviction is tested. Together, these works chart freedom as both a public act and a private reckoning, unfolding as a journey through the forces that shape history — and the lives caught within it.

JEFFERSON LIVES! MUSIC BY Joshua Daniel Nichols

JEFFERSON LIVES! LIBRETTO BY Stefanos Koroneos, based on the original concept and source text by Dr. James R. Harrigan

SUOR ANGELICA MUSIC BY Giacomo Puccini

SUOR ANGELICA LIBRETTO BY Giovacchino Forzano

LOCATION

The Sam at The Flea Theater
20 Thomas St, New York, NY 10007

SUNG IN

Jefferson Lives! — English, with supertitles
Suor Angelica — Italian, with English supertitles

RUNNING TIME

Jefferson Lives! runs for approximately 50 minutes and is presented together with Suor Angelica, which runs for approximately 65 minutes, with one twenty-minute intermission.

Total running time for the double bill is approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes.

ACCESSIBILITY

The Flea and all Teatro Grattacielo productions are wheelchair accessible and disability-friendly. Please contact us in advance for any specific accommodation needs.

JEFFERSON LIVES! is co-commissioned with POLYHYMNIA *

JEFFERSON LIVES! Synopsis

Jefferson Lives! opens on a divided stage: a restless modern Narrator waking from a troubled dream, and the ghost of John Adams, already present, already watching. What unfolds is not a historical pageant but an intimate reckoning — two voices across two centuries tracing how the American Revolution moved from a single courtroom argument to the irreversible bloodshed of Lexington and Concord. Through aria, fragmented monologue, and moments where projected text replaces the human voice entirely, the opera asks what it truly costs to cross the line from subject to citizen.

Structured in eleven parts, Jefferson Lives! follows the Narrator’s psychological journey from passive observer to unwilling participant — drawn deeper into the past with each act of colonial resistance and each tightening of imperial grip. The opera refuses triumphalism. It ends not with celebration but with a dark, restrained lullaby and the quiet, solemn weight of a door closing. The revolution has begun. There was never any turning back.

SUOR ANGELICA Synopsis

Set in a seventeenth-century convent, Giacomo Puccini’s Suor Angelica follows a young nun who has spent seven years in seclusion after being forced to abandon her illegitimate child. When her aristocratic aunt arrives to demand that Angelica renounce her inheritance, she also reveals that the child died two years earlier. Overcome by grief, Angelica takes her own life, only to realize in her final moments that suicide may have separated her from the son she longs to see again. In the opera’s transcendent conclusion, a vision of the Virgin Mary and the child offers Angelica forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace.

This production reimagines that final hour of grief as something closer to memory itself — a life relived in its last moments, suspended between what was lived and what was lost.

​Composer’s Statement

My music is rooted in the belief that expressive immediacy and long-term architectural design are inseparable. Working within a fundamentally tonal language enriched by chromatic harmony, modal color, and contemporary sonorities, I strive to create music that communicates directly while revealing greater depth through repeated listening. Whether composing concert works, sacred music, or opera, I seek to weave small musical ideas into a larger expressive tapestry, allowing themes, motives, and harmonic relationships to evolve across the span of an entire work. This approach is central to my opera Jefferson Lives!, where melodies, quotations, and stylistic gestures drawn from Revolutionary-era America are transformed and interwoven throughout the score, reflecting the ideals, conflicts, and aspirations of the nation’s founding while contributing to a unified dramatic and musical structure. My aim is to write music that honors the past without imitating it, embracing tradition as a living foundation for works that are intellectually engaging, emotionally compelling, and unmistakably contemporary.

Joshua Daniel Nichols

https://joshdnichols.com

Director’s Statement

Jefferson Lives! approaches the American Revolution not as a fixed narrative but as a living psychological and theatrical experience. John Adams appears as a ghost shaped by memory and moral burden, while a modern Narrator—an accidental protagonist—finds himself overtaken by the history he thought he only knew. Moving fluidly between dialogue, monologue, music, and silence, the work transforms documented events into a dramatic journey that traces how ideas of freedom and resistance migrate from thought into action. It invites audiences to encounter the Revolution not as a monument, but as an unresolved human reckoning.

Suor Angelica undergoes a parallel reckoning. Puccini himself ends the opera in hallucination — as Angelica dies, reality dissolves into a vision of the Virgin Mary and her son, a moment where the borders of the real are already breaking down. This production takes that blurring, which Puccini reserved for the final minutes, and extends it across the entire opera. Rather than unfolding as a linear convent drama, the piece becomes the interior world of a dying woman, her whole life relived in the space of an hour. Angelica remains fixed in a single, isolated bed — the only solid, unmoving reality on stage — while every other figure she has ever known returns to her as a ghost: sisters, memories, the child she was made to give up, all summoned from the same place that holds John Adams in Jefferson Lives! — the place where the past refuses to stay past. Staged in black and white, populated by figures who are present and absent at once, this production asks the same question of Angelica that the evening asks of Jefferson and Adams: what happens when history stops being something we observe, and becomes something we are forced to live inside again.

Stefanos Koroneos

https://stefanoskoroneos.com

* About Polyhymnia

Polyhymnia is an interdisciplinary collective of scholars, composers, and artists dedicated to creating an unsafe space for the beautiful—a space where ideas challenge assumptions and where artistic and intellectual exploration can unfold freely.

We publish monographs, edited volumes, essays, peer-reviewed research, and original artistic work that examines the relationship between the arts, the humanities, and the American traditions of freedom and a dynamic cultural marketplace.

Through lectures, conferences, educational programs, podcasts, and seminars, Polyhymnia brings rigorous conversation about the fine arts, economics, politics, philosophy, and culture into the public square.

Venue Accessibility: Our performance venues are fully wheelchair accessible with step-free entry and accessible restrooms. Assistive Listening Devices (ALDs) are available at the theater for patrons who require sound amplification.

Programmatic Accommodations:

• Captions: All performances feature English supertitles.

• Materials: Large-print programs are available at the box office upon request.

How to Request Additional Accommodations: If you require specific accommodations not listed above (such as sign language interpretation, sighted guides, or specific seating arrangements), please contact us in advance so we can ensure the best possible experience for you.

Contact for Requests: Please direct all accessibility inquiries to our Section 504 Coordinator, Stefanos Koroneos
Email: stefanoskoroneos@grattacielo.org
(We kindly ask that requests for specific services be made at least 2 weeks prior to the performance date.)