Where's Dick? Pandemic Edition

Inspired by the Boldface Headlines of the 1980s, Where’s Dick? is a comic book indictment of the criminals and criminality of the Reagan era. The opera premiered more than thirty years ago at the Houston Grand Opera with Richard Foreman directing and John DeMain conducting. It has not dated. Stump Tower became the President of the United States! Where’s Dick? grew out of the performance practices of the 1980s and is indebted to New Vaudeville clowns, espeically Bill Irwin. Old Vaudeville, too, and comics, detective fiction and Film Noir. Mostly it was a receptacle for our outrage at the corruption we saw everywhere. Our instrument was not anger but humor - rude, ribald and ridiculous. What was at first a three act, then a two act opera is now the length of a cartoon. The opera almost became a cartoon with Greg Ford directing and characters by Doug Compton. While this new version is much shorter, it is not short on the indignation that fueled its original. And the times they have only changed for the worse!