Gertrude Stein Saints!

You’ll find plenty of avant-garde ecstasy at Gertrude Stein Saints! The brainchild of director Michelle Sutherland, an MFA candidate for directing at Carnegie Mellon, the piece resets passages from Stein’s opera librettos Four Saints in Three Acts and Saints and Singing in musical styles from the great songbook of Americana. (Though remembered as a Paris expat, Stein was born near Pittsburgh.) The modernist icon’s characteristic wordplay—a maelstrom of poetic sounds that carry little linear meaning—comes freshly alive when teased out by such styles as doo-wop, bluegrass, jazz, soul and even hip-hop, sung with minimal instrumentation to music developed for the project by its cast of 13 undergrads.