Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has been turned into a film, a radio series, a stage play and a graphic novel — not to mention the smash-hit Hulu series starring Elisabeth Moss.
Now, the Bay Area gets to be the first California region to experience The Handmaid’s Tale, the opera. More relevant than ever in a post-Roe v. Wade America, the opera makes its West Coast premiere on Sept. 14 at San Francisco Opera.
Atwood’s dystopian tale of totalitarian patriarchy was adapted to the opera stage in 1998 by Danish composer Poul Ruders, with libretto by Paul Bentley, and had its world premiere in Copenhagen. Praised for its minimalist, haunting approach to the story of women with no agency living under forced insemination by a far-right theocracy, the opera had been scheduled to run in San Francisco in 2020 before being delayed by the pandemic.
The timely themes in The Handmaid’s Tale are just one part of San Francisco Opera’s newly announced 2024–25 season. Along with standby favorites like Puccini’s La bohème, Bizet’s Carmen and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, the War Memorial Opera House will also be home to Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera and Mozart’s rarely performed Idomeneo.
And, while the Metropolitan Opera in New York seems to have suddenly discovered the value of contemporary works — among them Berkeley composer John Adams’ Antony and Cleopatra, which premiered in San Francisco last year — a new commission by composer Huang Ruo and librettist David Henry Hwang, The Monkey King (美猴王), is set to premiere at SF Opera sometime in 2025.
