This May, WNO Youth Opera presents The Pied Piper of Hamelin & The Crab That Played With The Sea at Wales Millennium Centre’s Weston Studio. This thrilling double bill is based on the classic poem by Robert Browning and Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, and with this connection to memorable childhood stories, the performance will be accessible to everyone who comes to see it: From the young members of the audience, to the young at heart.
A mysterious musician offers to rescue the town of Hamelin from a plague of rats with his magical pipe-playing in The Pied Piper of Hamelin. However, once his task is complete, the greedy Mayor refuses to pay him, and so the Piper lures the town’s children away. In The Crab That Played With The Sea, Kipling presents the story of the Crab who ignored the rules set by the creator of the World to listen and obey ‘man’. Defying the rules, the Crab becomes the ruler of the sea, but is punished for his efforts. While both tales revolve around the fantastical and the mythological, the morals remain applicable to our day to day lives. Tales of caution to keep to your word, and explorations of individuality are themes that are explored within our own lives, whether as children or as adults, and make for a fantastic first opera experience.
For the first time in WNO Youth Opera history, we will have put additional services in place to ensure that everybody has the chance to enjoy and experience opera. We are pleased to offer Touch Tours ahead of both performances on Sunday 28 May. These tours, which will take place an hour before curtain up, are designed to help people with sight loss familiarise themselves with the set, props and performance space. This service has helped a number of people to enjoy a new dimension to opera that hasn’t been available to them before. Following the physical exploration of the set, it’ll be time to sit down and enjoy the performance, with audio description and bilingual (Welsh and English) surtitles. The goal of these events is to ensure that opera is as open and available as possible, and that everybody has the chance to enjoy great opera with Welsh National Opera.
We are committed to sharing the magic of opera with as many people as possible and as part of this commitment, we offer accessible performances every Season. Find out more about our Access Performances, including Audio Description and Touch Tours here.