Filmed Version: What’s OperaDoc?

The New Mercury Collective, following the “operafilm” projects Orson Rehearsed and 9/10: Love Before the Fall that combined opera and film, has undertaken a new way of coming to grips with the combination of filmic and musical techniques in I Hear America Singing. This “operadoc” combines the rhetoric of live performance documentary and narrative cinema to dissect the tropes that have become associated with both and a staged musical revue about musical theater that implodes the conventions of stage script and screenplay to examine the narratives that creative artists and audiences create to calculate a sense of self-worth and to come to grips with the creative process.

If, during its first moments, it reads like an interview with Robbie, an irascible middle-aged composer whose best years are behind him, the film immediately expands into a trio of mid-life crises, and a meditation on the role that the evolving idea of “originality” plays in the private, personal narratives that commercial and fine artists tell themselves to justify their life decisions. As the “musical about musicals” is rehearsed, it gradually takes on the role of MacGuffin, so that, by the time the “live backer’s audition” with which the film climaxes unfolds, Robbie is speaking the actions in the script of the staged musical and the screenplay as they transpire.

The project was filmed in May 2024 in Pittsburgh, PA. One component was a live production at the Robert E Rauh Studio Theater on 9, 10, 11 May. Production consisted of four days of documentary and filmic shooting in different locations. I Hear America Singing was an Aria412 and Burning Sled Media presentation of a New Mercury Collective production conceived, written, and directed by Daron Hagen starring Robert Frankenberry, Desiree Soteres, and Christopher Scott. The Director of Photography is Talal Jabari; the Assistant Director is Tevi Eber; the lighting designs were by Eve Bandi.

The film is currently in post production and will be released in 2025.