May 9–25
Thursdays–Saturdays (8pm)
Sundays (2pm)
Queenie Pie, jazz giant Duke Ellington's final large-scale work, receives the royal treatment from the Oakland Opera Theater. Ellington's muse was Madame C.J. Walker, the daughter of slaves who built a million-dollar empire selling specially made beauty products to African American women door-to-door. Ellington recast Walker's rags-to-riches story as a televised opera/melodrama — though the work was still unfinished when he died in 1974. Oakland Opera now presents the historic debut of the first fully restored, newly completed version of Ellington's score, staged as if for its originally intended 1960s telecast.
– Matt Sussman