Ravinia 2026 Issue 5

COMPOSER ROBERT KAPILOW was reading Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham to his young son one evening in when he suddenly had a revelation: e beloved s children’s story would be the perfect basis for a children’s opera. “You realize that it’s really a piece about prejudice,” he said, “and the only thing wrong with the eggs is that they are colored—green,” he said. “So, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be a great thing to set this to music?’ Plus, it would be the only opera libretto that every kid would know by heart before they walked in.” A er some knotty back and forth with the Dr. Seuss estate, the resulting -minute opera debuted under the auspices of the New Jersey Chamber Music Society a year later and was an immediate hit. “Robert Kapilow’s Green Eggs and Ham , a merry, whiz-bang romp through the Dr. Seuss classic, is a winner—and for all the right reasons. Let’s dispense with circumspection. is piece is destined to go far,” wrote music critic Michael Redmond in the New Jersey Star-Ledger . And, indeed, the work has gone on to become a contemporary family classic right alongside such long-established favorites as Sergei Proko ev’s Peter and the Wolf and Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra . In addition to scores of performances in the United States and Canada and a recording, there is even a European video version spearheaded by French conductor Sonia Ben Santamaria. e latest performance of Kapilow’s Green Eggs and Ham , along with its counterpart, Gertrude McFuzz , will take place August in Ravinia’s Martin e- atre in an early-a ernoon program titled Dr. Seuss Goes to the Opera . Featured will be conductor Aaron Kaplan and nine members of Chicago’s JAM Orches- tra along with sopranos Desirée Hassler and Colleen Leonard and a six-member ensemble of dancer-actors. “We knew that this would be an incredible t,” said Whitney Langas, one of three co-founders of the Lark Creative Group, which is producing the show. “You’ve got a place like Ravinia. Dr. Seuss is a great name alone. Plus partnering with something like opera, it can’t go wrong. And, clearly, it sold out in two weeks. So, I feel like this is some- thing that the community wants to see.” Kapilow, who resides in Montvale, NJ, is known as a music educator as much as a conductor and composer, and is especially reputed for his What Makes It Great? presentations, in which he looks under the hood of musical masterworks in approachable yet insightful ways. His What Makes It Great? radio series was broadcast for more than a decade on National Public Radio’s Performance Today , and he continues to present the lecture-demonstrations in concert halls across the country, including for years as part of the Celebrity Series of Boston (now Vivo Performing Arts) along with his Familymusik series there. When Kapilow set his sights on writ- ing an opera based on Green Eggs and Ham , the Dr. Seuss estate was so strict about the use of the author’s stories and images that many of his friends advised him to not even bother trying. And, sure enough, his initial requests to use the text were rebu ed. But it so happened that one of Kapilow’s lawyers knew another lawyer connected to the Dr. Seuss estate, and that attorney’s father had been a famous music educator. So, Kapilow wrote to him, noting that one of the central messages of Green Eggs and Ham is the willingness to give something unknown a try. “How can you not at least let someone try this?” he recalls asking. So, the estate relented to a point, allowing the composer to do one trial performance of the opera outside of New York City if he could nd a pre- senter willing to commission it on spec. e now-defunct New Jersey Chamber Music Society agreed to the plan, and his nal hurdle was playing and singing excerpts from the opera for representa- tives of the Dr. Seuss estate. at initial lone performance took place in December in an elementa- ry-school auditorium in Montclair, NJ, and kismet struck. e Star-Ledger sent Redmond to cover it, and it turned out that the critic loved the piece. A er the glowing review was published, Kapilow immediately had o ers from two of the classical world’s biggest music publish- ers—G. Schirmer and Boosey & Hawkes. “And that’s how it all began,” he said. IN WRITING THE MUSIC for Green Eggs and Ham and Gertrude McFuzz , Kapilow did not try to somehow make it more accessible for children. “When I write for adults, I don’t write fundamen- tally di erently than when I write for kids,” the composer said. “You’re aware that there’s an audience you want to get what’s going on, but this is real music.” So, there are tunes that children will rec- ognize like “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” but he also infuses the score with what Redmond described as “spiky, piquant modernism à la Stravinsky’s [ballet] Petrouchka .” Kaplan took a slightly di erent tack in his description, comparing the musical language to the early, avant-gar- de writing of th-century American composer Aaron Copland, a style the conductor said ts the “quirky, comical, whimsical world” of Dr. Seuss. “ ere’s a lot of percussion—literal bells and whistles,” he said. “And the music always seems to be changing moods and char- acter with the story, and it really does a great job of keeping the kids engaged.” Kapilow has led dozens of perfor- mances of his Dr. Seuss operas, includ- ing one at Ravinia in with soprano Angelina Réaux (who also headlined RAVINIA.ORG • RAVINIAMAGAZINE 19 ILLUSTRATIONS COURTESY LARK CREATIVE GROUP