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Tulsa Opera Presents "Dead Man Walking"

[Aired on Friday, February 24th.] On this edition of StudioTulsa, we speak with Jake Heggie, the composer of "Dead Man Walking," which premiered in San Francisco in 2000, and has since become one of the most popular and most widely performed American operas of today (with more than 150 performances worldwide). Tulsa Opera will stage "Dead Man Walking" at the Tulsa PAC on Saturday the 25th (at 7:30pm), Friday the 2nd (at 7:30pm), and Sunday the 4th (at 2:30pm). Heggie's other works as a composer include the operas "Moby-Dick," "Three Decembers," "The End of the Affair," and "To Hell and Back," as well as more than 200 songs --- along with concerti, chamber music, choral, and orchestral works. As he tells us on today's ST, "Dead Man Walking" --- featuring a libretto (based on Sister Helen Prejean's non-fiction book of the same title) by Terrence McNally --- was the first opera Heggie ever composed, and its origins date back to the middle 1990s, when the likewise-titled, award-winning motion picture was all the rage. For more information, please go to tulsaopera.com. (Editor's note: Sister Helen appeared on StudioTulsa earlier this week.)

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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