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Westminster Opera Theatre presents Haydn’s science-fiction opera Il Mondo della Luna (The World on the Moon) Friday, December 5 at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, December 6 at 7:30 p.m. in Princeton Regional School’s Performing Arts Center in Princeton High School. Featuring Westminster Choir College students, the fully staged opera will be performed in Italian with English supertitles and orchestra. Music director is William Hobbs and the stage director is Joseph Levitt.

The comedic science-fiction opera revolves around the phony astrologer Ecclitico and Ernesto who are in love with the daughters of the wealthy Buonafede, who will never give permission for these unions. Ecclitico claims to have built a telescope strong enough to not only see the moon, but also its inhabitants, and fools Buonafede into believing that they’ve actually traveled to the moon. Bamboozled into thinking that he is marrying his daughters to the emperor of the moon and a star, he accepts his fate when finding out the truth.

Westminster Choir College faculty member Williams Hobbs works at many of the world’s major opera houses as conductor and coach. These include the Opéra National de Paris, the Salzburg Festival, San Francisco Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, Seattle Opera, Washington Opera and the Opéra de Monte-Carlo. He has assisted conductors Claudio Abbado, Sir Charles Mackerras, Jiří Bělohlávek, Jiří Kout, Marco Armiliato and many others, and worked closely with singers such as Renée Fleming, Susan Graham, Frederica von Stade, Sonia Ganassi, Placido Domingo, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Sam Ramey and Kurt Moll. Mr. Hobbs has devoted a large portion of his career to working with young singers. He was on the faculty of the Aspen Opera Theater Center of the Aspen Music Festival for six years, and he has been on the faculty of the CoOPERAtive Program at Westminster Choir College since 2008. He was on the coaching staff of the Juilliard School of Music for many years and was invited by the National Theater of Tokyo as visiting master coach.

Stage director Joseph Levitt has sung over 40 leading tenor roles in more than 1,500 performances. Mr. Levitt has performed with the Indianapolis Opera Company, and he was heard in Robert Ward’s The Crucible with the Toledo Opera, and in Lucia di Lammermoor (Edgardo) with Opera Illinois. Also on this continent, he has performed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra and the title character in Berlioz’s La damnation de Faust with the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra.

He is the former director of the Ball State University Opera Theatre, where his productions included Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte and The Impresario; Puccini’s Madama Butterfly; Händel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto; Mascagni’s L’amico Fritz; Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas; and Massenet’s Werther. In 2009 he founded the Pocket Opera at Ball State University, an off-shoot of the main opera program, dedicated to performing one-act and chamber operas in English. Productions included Menotti’s The Medium, and Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi. As a professional stage director, his engagements include productions with Opera Illinois, Mississippi Opera and Western Plains Opera.

Westminster Opera Theatre has been praised for its innovative productions of a wide range of operas.  Participants in the program have gone on to perform in opera houses around the world.  Recent productions have included Savitri by Gustav Holst; Oreste by George Frideric Handel; L’enfant Prodigue by Claude Debussy; L’enfant et les Sortilèges by Maurice Ravel; Così fan tutte, La Clemenza di Tito, Il re pastore, Die Zauberflöte and Der Schauspieldirektor by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; Dialogues des Carmélites by Francis Poulenc; Albert Herring and A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Benjamin Britten; Les contes d’Hoffman by Jacques Offenbach; Gianni Schicchi by Giacomo Puccini; and Iolanta by Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky.

Tickets are $25 for adults and $20 for students and seniors.  They can be purchased at the door, through the Westminster box office at 609-921-2663 or online at www.rider.edu/arts. For more information, visit www.rider.edu/arts. Princeton High School is located at 151 Moore Street in Princeton, N.J.