Prospero artists

This production of Prospero's Island boasts a stellar cast with a chamber orchestra comprising Ninth Planet players and guests under the direction of Nathaniel Berman. Philip Lowery is stage director.

Andrew Dwan

Andrew Dwan, in the title role of Prospero, is a versatile performer known for his magnetic stage presence. His previous roles include the title role in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Collatinus in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, Dandini in Rossini's Cenerentola, and Dulcamara in Donizetti’s L'Elisir d'Amore. He recently completed his second summer at the San Francisco Merola Opera Program, where his Mephistopheles was praised for “rich, flexible tone and convincing acting” (Bay Area Reporter) and whose “constantly secure voice knew how to shape every phrase with dramatic significance” (Rehearsal Studio), as well as providing “comic delight out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’” (San Francisco Chronicle). Andrew Dwan also is known for his advocacy of new opera, including Anne LeBaron's LSD at Disney Redcat Hall. Next year he will make his lead role debut with the Shanghai Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic.

Coloratura soprano Shawnette Sulker, as Ariel, is well known to Bay Area audiences for her many performances in a variety of roles. She has been described as a singer “…displaying a bright, superbly controlled soprano with perfectly placed coloratura.” On the operatic stage, Ms. Sulker has been a featured artist in three San Francisco Opera productions: Porgy and Bess, The Mother of Us All, and Louise. A native of Guyana, she has sung leading roles with other companies of note, including Hawaii Opera Theatre, Internationale Opera Producties, Opera Naples, Union Avenue Opera, Natchez Opera Festival, Pacific Opera Project, West Edge Opera, Festival Opera, Music in the Mountains, Mendocino Music Festival, and West Bay Opera, to name a few. Ms. Sulker created the role of Corina in the world premiere of David Conte’s opera Firebird Motel.

Shawnette Sulker

Bradley Kynard

Baritone Bradley Kynard, in the role of Caliban, has performed with companies throughout the Bay Area. He made his SF Opera debut as Daggoo in Moby Dick and has performed varied roles, including John Brook in Little Women with Island City Opera, Don Ramiro in Xochitl and the Flowers with Opera Parallèle, Chirurgo in La Forza del Destino with West Bay Opera, Obiny in La Traviata with San Jose Opera and the title role in Tamerlano with the Handel Opera Project. Recent work includes performance with the Kronos Quartet in their commissioned piece At War with Ourselves and, during the pandemic, recording of roles in Erling Wold's A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil and on-line performance in Dunn's Finding Medusa.

Soprano Amy Foote, as Miranda, has collaborated with many groups, including Berkeley Symphony, the SF Contemporary Music Players, Ninth Planet, Eco Ensemble and the San Francisco Symphony on their Sound Box Series. She has premiered works by many composers, also contributing to developing media of virtual opera and "Laptop Orchestra Opera." In the operatic world, Ms. Foote has performed such roles as Lydia in Kirke Mechem’s Pride and Prejudice and the titular role in The Cunning Little Vixen with West Edge Opera, where her voice was described as “sinuous [and] bright-toned…[with] an alluringly silvery sheen” by the San Francisco Chronicle. Amy Foote also steps easily into the realm of pop and recorded music and received an ASCAP writing credit for the movie Summertime in 2020. During quarantine, she began composing musical rituals known as “Postcard Rituals” and “Mail Order Concerts."

Amy Foote

Sergio Gonzalez

Tenor Sergio Gonzalez, in the role of Andy (Fernando), has been heralded by San Francisco Classical Voice as singing with "great charm and excellent vocal ability." He has performed with Opera Santa Barbara, Opera Parallèle, Mendocino Music Festival, Pacific Opera Project, Pocket Opera and Island City Opera, in the roles of Prunier in Puccini’s La Rondine, Laurie in Adamo’s Little Women, Elvino in Bellini’s La Sonnambula, Ernesto in Donizetti's Don Pasquale, Count Almaviva in Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Belmonte in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and Don Ottavio in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Classical Sonoma describes González' "liquid" voice as having, "sparkled with graceful beauty and intelligent musicianship," and lauds, "his subtle mastery of expression and phrasing and his innate integration of singing and physicality." Sergio Gonzalez is a graduate of San Francisco Conservatory, where he studied under Cesar Ulloa.

Coloratura soprano Angela Jarosz, in the comic role of Trish (Trinculo) is a frequent performer with companies including The Handel Opera Project, Berkeley Chamber Opera, and Lamplighters Music Theater. Favorite roles include Semele in Semele, Soeur Constance in Dialogues des Carmélites, Belinda in Dido & Aeneas, Cunegonde in Candide, Olympia in Les Contes d’Hoffmann, and Amy in Little Women with Island City Opera, for which she received praise from Joshua Kosman for her "nimble performance" in an often overlooked role. Angela is an East Bay Opera League Scholarship Winner (2018). She holds degrees from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Roosevelt University.

Angela Jarosz

Julia Hathaway

Soprano Julia Hathaway in the comic role of Steffi (Stephano) has appeared often on the West Edge Opera Snapshot series, where she received praise in San Francisco Classical Voice for her recent, "brilliantly sung" performance in the Ryan Suleiman opera, The School for Girls Who Lost Everything in the Fire. With degrees in music from Northwestern University and in vocal performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Ms. Hathaway is an active performer in opera, recital, and contemporary chamber music around the Bay Area, recently appearing in concert with Ninth Planet. She has previously taught at the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts as well as performing in educational opera outreach programs through the San Francisco Opera Guild.

Tenor Michael Mendelsohn, as Captain Al (Alonso), performs with many Bay Area opera companies, often in comic or character roles ranging from Monostatos in The Magic Flute (West Bay Opera) and The Devil in The Soldiers’ Tale, to
Don Basilio in The Marriage of Figaro (Livermore Valley Opera). Michael created the character of Mr. Brooke in the Shearer/Stevens opera Middlemarch in Spring and embodied the wildly comical school teacher in their 2010 one-act chamber opera, A Very Large Mole in Berkeley and San Francisco.

Michael Mendelsohn

Conductor and Music Director Nathaniel Berman maintains an active presence as a performer and music educator in the San Francisco Bay Area. Co-Artistic Director of Ninth Planet, he has led premieres of many commissioned works, and in 2014 worked with Bang on a Can All-Stars and Alarm Will Sound in recording the composer Jenny Olivia Johnson’s album Don’t Look Back. He conducted a program of premieres with Empyrean at UC Davis in 2019, as well as the premiere of The Pressure by Brian Baumbusch at San Francisco’s Other Minds Festival. Mr. Berman has appeared as guest conductor of the UCSC Orchestra and the University Opera Theater, and as guest conductor of the Santa Cruz County Symphony in collaborative concerts with the Youth Symphony. A faculty member at UC Santa Cruz, he is conductor of the UCSC Concert Choir and the UCSC Wind Ensemble.

Nathaniel Berman

Philip Lowery

Director Philip Lowery's masterful stage direction and set creation for the Shearer/Stevens opera Howards End, America brought acclaim to its 2019 premiere at Z Space, a production marked both by its elegant design artistry and the intense, heartfelt performances of its brilliant cast. He again performs the roles of both stage director and scenic designer of Prospero's Island. With directing credits at Berkeley Opera, North Bay Opera, Lamplighters Music Theatre, and Berkeley Contemporary Opera (of which he was a co-founder), he recently was an actor and a Resident Artist of San Francisco Shakespeare Festival. Phil Lowery is highly sought after as both a production manager, designer and stage director of theater, as well as opera, having directed for companies including Central Works, Altarena Playhouse, Berkeley Playhouse and Shotgun Players.

Composer Allen Shearer has been honored with the Rome Prize, Charles Ives Award, several MacDowell residencies, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was the first to be awarded an artist residency at the Aaron Copland House. Shearer composes in many media with an emphasis on vocal music and opera. His choral works, commissioned by Chanticleer, have been performed worldwide. Prospero's Island is his newest full-length chamber opera and his ninth collaboration with librettist Claudia Stevens. His chamber opera The Dawn Makers, premiered at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, was a finalist in the 2015 National Opera Association’s Dominick Argento Chamber Opera Competition. The Z Space premiere of his opera Middlemarch in Spring was named one of the "Ten Best Operatic Events" of 2015 by the San Francisco Chronicle (Kosman). "Middlemarch" received subsequent productions by companies in Virginia and Knoxville, Tennessee. And Howards End, America, a production by Earplay Ensemble, premiered in San Francisco in 2019 to wide acclaim. Allen Shearer holds diplomas in opera and concert singing from the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria and a PhD in composition from the University of California at Berkeley. His composition teachers included Max Deutsch in Paris and Andrew Imbrie at UC, Berkeley. His career as a singer has embraced opera, oratorio and concert music ranging from the early baroque to the 20th and 21st centuries and includes premieres and commercial recordings of works by composers including Anne LeBaron, Roger Sessions and Charles Wuorinen.

Allen Shearer

Claudia Stevens

Claudia Stevens is known as a librettist of skill, imagination and daring, often adapting works of literature in provocative, fanciful ways that engage today’s audiences. The San Francisco Examiner wrote that her libretto for Middlemarch in Spring (2015) "brings the novel to life with uncanny mastery" (Gereben), while Ambroff Tahan called her conception of E.M Forster's novel in the Shearer/Stevens opera Howards End, America (2019) "a fresh, resonant, gripping American take on the classic novel." Born in rural Northern California to Czech and Austrian Holocaust-survivor parents, Claudia Stevens has had many honors over a varied career. As a pianist, she commissioned and premiered dozens of new works, performing at venues, including Carnegie Recital Hall, Washington's National Gallery and Boston's Jordan Hall, and was the featured artist on several “Performance Today” on NPR broadcasts. Subsequently, as a singer-pianist and monologue artist, she gave solo performances at hundreds of American colleges and universities and in theaters from Toronto to Budapest to Burma. Her tours, original works and commissioning of other artists have garnered grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the NEA (“New Forms”) and International Theater Institute. Claudia Stevens is a summa cum laude graduate of Vassar College and holds graduate degrees from UC, Berkeley and Boston University. Eight chamber operas she created with Allen Shearer have been produced to date.

Artists