Melting Faces Since 2007: The Baltimore Rock Opera Society is back with an epic double-feature of Byzantine tragedy and Sci-Fi comedy by Cara Ober
The Baltimore Rock Opera Society wants to melt your face. Dylan Koehler, a founding member of BROS, as it is affectionately known, explains how the term was coined. “Melting faces is what we do,” he says, earnestly. “The Baltimore Rock Opera Society strives to create these moments, where the audience has to hang on to their faces to keep them attached, because they are jumping out of their seats, ecstatically head-banging and dancing. We want our audience to get into the performance as a theater event, but also as a rock show. We try to make every moment you are watching a spectacle.”
The Baltimore Rock Opera Society started out in 2007 as a half joke among a handful of recent Goucher College graduates, who thought it would be “epic” to put on a rock opera with a live band. The more they discussed it, the more determined they became to bring their vision to life. The founders of the society spent a year and a half creating Gründlehämmer, a three-hour rock opera, from scratch. The musical chronicles the adventures of a farm boy/guitar player-turned-hero from the fantastical, medieval kingdom of Brotopia. Gründlehämmer was performed to sold-out audiences in the fall of 2009 and included fog machines, wailing guitar solos, shadow-puppet theater, strobe lights, and a giant monster.
This year, the BROS has upped the ante with a double-feature of two original rock operas. The first, Amphion, is a tragic love story set in Byzantine Constantinople and the second, The Terrible Secret of Lunastus, is a comic 1950s-style sci-fi adventure. The two performances couldn’t be more different, although both will share the same six-person rock band and choir.
“I think we have a masochistic drive to make our newest performance bigger and with a higher production value than the last,” says Koehler. “We were happy with Gründlehämmer, but instead of writing something similar, we added an extra rock opera to the show and a theater renovation. We always want to push against the boundaries of the impossible, for better or worse.”
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