It’s Gonzo and It’s Opera!

NEWS | TUESDAY, APRIL 14 | BY FUSION STAFF WRITER, RUDOLFO CARRILLO

Composer Daniel Steven Crafts wanted to talk about opera, Gonzo Opera at FUSION, to be exact. That’s just fine with me—more than fine, I thought. And so, we made an appointment to chat.

But before we get to the interview with a man who I am certain is a visionary within and without a musical medium I’ve been excited about since adolescence—and how you really should come and see Craft’s Gonzo Opera at FUSION, it is that damn good—I’ll start by telling you that I absolutely love opera.

I always make time to listen to the weekend broadcasts from the Met. For such encounters, I have a copy of  Milton Cross’ Complete Stories of the Great Operas sitting nearby, for reference, just in case. When my parents were alive, we made going to the opera in Santa Fe a monthly summer lark. One time, as an undergraduate at UNM, John O. Crosby, one of the founders of the Santa Fe Opera, enlisted me to be the stage manager for the yearly auditions he used to hold at Keller Hall.

But this story isn’t about me. It’s about a legendary composer who—like the heroically long-haired and resilient incarnation of a Wagerian epic—continues to ride waves of triumph and musical excellence into theatres and auditoriums in your neighborhood.

Craft’s foray into a form he has reinvigorated by indulging Postmodern popular culture is called Gonzo Opera. His latest creation is entitled Blind Cupid Online: The Dating Opera. The work premieres at FUSION on Friday, April 24, at 7:00 PM. There will also be matinee performances of the work on Saturday, April 25, at 2:00 PM and Sunday, April 26, at 2:00 PM.

What follows is merely a brief look at and into a local creative whose work is vast and immeasurably a part of American musical culture and the Albuquerque music scene.

Rudolfo Carrillo: Daniel, could you please tell our readers a little bit about yourself, your work; where you’re at, hep cat? Where are you going with Gonzo Opera; where do you want to be?

Daniel Steven Crafts: Well, I’m a composer of opera and symphonic music. And I have a whole catalog of works. I’ve written some two dozen operas, eighteen symphonies, a variety of other works, a number of large symphonic poems and then symphonic works. I was lucky enough to meet and work with the great American tenor Jerry Hadley in San Francisco.

Did that meeting and collaboration with the legendary lyric tenor change your work as a composer?

I told him my philosophy of writing. I said there are three reasons why works of any genre get into the repertoire and stay in the repertoire. And those three reasons are melody, melody, memorable melody. Well, Jerry loved that; a couple of months later, he called me up in my apartment in Berkeley, and he said, “I love the way you write. I want to commission you to write a series of works for me.” That was the beginning of a whole new era in my life. So it [that collaboration]became a work called The Song & the Slogan, which is a line from one of the [Carl] Sandburg poems. And we recorded it in Illinois, in Urbana, the same venue where the Chicago Symphony records. And it was made into a program for PBS. We were fortunate enough to win the Emmy for Best Music for it in 2003.

As some in the world of opera know, Mr. Hadley died under tragic circumstances in 2007; what happened in regards to your work in the aftermath?

Jerry and I had a number of projects on the drawing board when he took his own life. I was so pleased to find that Jerry took a singer under his wing and mentored him for a couple of years. That singer is now an opera star in his own right, Brian Cheney. Brian and I became great friends; we have completed some of the projects that Jerry and I had on the drawing board at the time. A couple of years ago, we recorded an album of orchestral songs and orchestral arias called Bright Star, which is a setting of a poem by the poet John Keats!

And your new work is just as intensely expansive, que no? How did Gonzo Opera come into being?

I was having dinner in San Francisco with my friend Shannon Wheeler. Shannon does this comic book called Too Much Coffee Man. We thought, well, you know, wouldn’t it be fun to do something together? But what would we do? He writes comic books. I write serious classical music. And the idea came up of an opera about Too Much Coffee Man. We both thought it was a terrible idea, so we dropped it. Later, Shannon had a dream that his characters were singing opera to him; he woke up in the middle of the night, and he sketched out some verses and a basic storyline. He sent it to me and I thought it was hilarious. I had no idea what we were going to do with it, but I thought it was really funny. Well, Shannon, who lives up in Portland, went out and got the Portland Center for the Performing Arts behind it; they hired people from the Portland Opera, and we put it on. To everybody’s amazement, because nobody had any idea what to expect, it was an enormous hit. It was supposed to, it ran for two weekends. And because of ticket sales, it ran a third, would have run a fourth, but the theatre was already booked.

How did that experience lead you to New Mexico and guide you toward Gonzo Opera?

To continue the story, after we had success with Too Much Coffee Man, I was at another dinner party in Santa Fe, after a play competition called Benchwarmers, an evening of fifteen-minute plays. I met a fellow named Thomas Woodward; his plays were always the wildest and wackiest of the bunch. He told me about the latest one that he produced, called And the Winner Is, about a Miss America beauty pageant that goes hopelessly wrong on live TV. And I thought, “Oh, this sounds great.” “Can you send me the script?” I said. I worked with him to put it into singable language. So, you know, repeating rhythms to make melodies out of it. “That is so much fun,” I thought, “I need a name for this. What can I call this?” I thought about it for a while, and I came up with the term Gonzo Opera!

So, what is Gonzo Opera?

Gonzo actually is an Italian word that means “buffoon” or “fool.” I coupled that with the current meaning, with gonzo meaning “wild” and “crazy.” So it's a kind of an oxymoron because most people think of opera as something very serious and heavy. The good thing is it’s something very different [from what people expect].

Could you tell our readers about your latest production? The curtain rises on Blind Cupid Online: The Dating Opera on April 24, at 7:00 PM.

This [opera] is about our librettist, Miffy Gevaar, which is a pseudonym. She has been through every dating program under the sun, online and off. And these experiences, good, bad, bizarre, are what she wrote about. She told me that, after a heroic number of bad dates, she developed a reflex for turning romantic disappointment into rhyme. Blind Cupid Online: The Dating Opera is the result. It’s opera for anyone who’s ever been ghosted, bread-crumbed, or forced to admire a man holding a suspiciously large fish. In Blind Cupid Online, we’re not just poking fun at romance in any and all permutations; we’re exposing how timeless our absurdities are. The technology is new-ish. The chaos is ancient. As Miffy says, as [her character in the opera] Danger Rabbit, “I’ve spent years studying the wild ecosystem of online dating and Blind Cupid Online is my field report.”

Gonzo Oper’s Blind Cupid Online: The Dating Opera is written by librettist Miffy Gevaar and Emmy-award-winning composer Daniel Steven Crafts. This hour-long work features Hannah Stephens, Esther Moses, Curtis Storm, Santiago Alfonzo Meza, Molly Hill (flute), Megan Snow (clarinet), and Scott Jacobsen (keyboard).

Friday, April 24, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Saturday, April 25, 2026 at 2:00 PM
Sunday, April 26, 2026 at 2:00 PM

FUSION | The Cell
700 1st Street Northwest Albuquerque, NM, 87102

Tickets Here.