Print
Last October, San Diego Opera became one of the first opera companies in America to return to production during the pandemic, with a well-attended “La bohème” presented for an audience of 4,200 people seated in their cars in the Pechanga Arena parking lot.
Next weekend, the company will return to the Pechanga lot for its spring opera festival, with a pandemic-inspired “One Amazing Night” concert on Saturday night, followed by a four-night run of Gioachino Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville,” April 25 through May 1.
Like last time, the festival will feature a cast of singers from around the country, the San Diego Symphony, video screens throughout the parking projecting close-ups of the singers and English translations of the libretto and high-definition audio streamed through the car radio.
Print Jonah Gercke grew up in a theatrical family, where both of his parents run local theater companies: Francis Gercke of Backyard Renaissance in San Diego and Kristianne Kurner of New Village Arts in Carlsbad.
But for the 22-year-old Gercke, who uses the pronouns they/them/theirs, film was always their first and only passion. At age 9, they could recite from memory the weekly film national box office tallies. And after graduating from high school in Carlsbad, they filmed a documentary on teen relations in Israel and the West Bank that earned the budding filmmaker a 2018 Genius grant from OZY Magazine.