All artwork ©2023 Vincent Myrand
—Merissa Beddows received a $5,000 Curtis Institute YAF grant towards the production of Marvelous, and the opera was a finalist for The American Prize in Opera.
—On Saturday, April 5, 2025, Sistersville (WV) Opera Presents: Marvelous! Starring Merissa Beddows.
Ozma, the recently completed 2nd part of the story, fills out the whole as a grand opera ready for the larger stage in a future performance.
What is Marvelous? A chamber opera that combines the approachability of musicals with the seriousness of opera. The chamber orchestra—and singers—bookend projected center stage illustrations created for the opera by noted Oz illustrator and artist Vincent Myrand. The music, in addition to acoustic instruments, has a unique feature: synthesized sampled strings are used as an ever-present sonic backdrop, which constantly evokes the magic of the Land of Oz, and also absorbs the uppermost partials of the high instruments and voices, smoothing out the overall timbre of the sound in a way an acoustic orchestra simply cannot.
The whole promises to become not just an opera, but an audio/visual experience carefully curated to minimize distractions for maximum immersion. Here, Merissa Beddows sings “I Am Both” from “Marvelous:”
“…Listening to the music makes me think that you employ both the freedom of chordal impressionistic colors and the clarity of diatonic transparencies. Your music is beautiful and accessible despite being less predictable (than one would expect) in terms of tonal center shifts. It emanates with light and peace… “ — Vasiliy Medved
Live abridgment of “Marvelous.” First go at a “traveling” version of the opera.
Marvelous is my adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s sequel to his Wizard of Oz, The Marvelous Land of Oz. The main reason I have adapted it is that the key element of the story, a surprise which reveals Princess Ozma as the true ruler of Oz, has never been told in detail.
This story affected me greatly when I discovered it at the age of nine. Starting as a novelization, soon the many threads and emotions which surfaced in my writing became too large for the printed page. I had already begun a series of arias to accompany the book, so it was logical to expand them and the story into the current opera.