Flight is that rarest thing, a popular new comic opera… Dove’s music flies, the opera is fun, and people are going to love it.”
–The Evening Standard
Music by Jonathan Dove; Libretto by April De Angelis
A slice of life story set in the everyday world of an airport terminal. An omniscient air traffic controller watches over a departure lounge bustling with cynical flight attendants, an excitable couple on vacation, a mysterious older woman, and a diplomat and his expectant wife, all of whom must spend the night to wait out a storm. A stateless refugee, stranded indefinitely in the terminal, listens to the passengers’ often entertaining stories while haplessly dodging an immigration officer.
Inspired by a true story—Mehran Karimi Nasseri’s 18-year forced residency at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport—the opera’s vignettes and meditations on love and identity are presented with winning humor, but without easy resolutions. In the end we discover how empathy for the anguished around us is a key element of human resilience, allowing us to surmount obstacles and fly another day.
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Flight was filmed on location at The Museum of Flight across several exhibits of the T.A. Wilson Great Gallery.