MassOpera uses a pickup truck for new roving concert series

This Labor Day, MassOpera will take its show on the road in the most literal sense. In the company’s Social DistanSing concert series, a festively decorated pickup truck bed is the stage, and residents at local public housing complexes are the audience. Using a PA system powered by a lawn mower battery, local singers Carley DeFranco and Katrina Holden-Buckley will treat residents (and anyone who happens to wander by) to opera, art songs, and Broadway favorites.

This series is one of the first MassOpera endeavors for co-artistic director Dan Ryan, who assumed the role near the beginning of the coronavirus-related lockdown. He was inspired to launch the traveling concert series by a similar project that Opera Memphis did, as well as a suggestion from his father about doing a patriotic show for July Fourth. Given the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the death of George Floyd in police custody, Ryan decided to take a different tack: “We programmed music that wasn’t so much ’Americana’ as it was singing hope and care, into all the diverse communities we stopped at,” Ryan explained in a Twitter message about the July Fourth concert.