This is Not About Natalie (2024)

This is Not About Natalie is a one-act opera that features a solo singer with a ventriloquist doll and guitar. She portrays a songwriter who uploads a new, original song everyday to Youtube and introduces each song in dialogue with her puppet. She was formerly one half of the underground duo, “Kris and Natalie.” Her former partner, Natalie, went on to become a famous popstar. But this is not about her.

This is Not About Natalie premiered at The Tank, New York, NY, March 20-22, 2025. An earlier version, titled Crystal’s Channel, had workshop performances at Brooklyn Art Haus, Brooklyn, NY, May 30, 2024, and at Harmonie Hall, Philadelphia, PA, June 2, 2024.

Sarah Daniels, soprano and guitar
Jason Cady, music, libretto, modular synthesizer
Shannon Sindelar, director
Krista Intranuovo Pineman, costume design
Erin Grey, production stage manager
Travis Just, live sound
Celia Krefter, lighting design
Benjamin Papac, production assistant
Jeff Cook, recording and mixing
Dmitry Glivinskiy, vocal coach
David Pym, video

NEW YORK — If there was any theme unifying the two wildly different one-acts premiered by Experiments in Opera (EiO) on March 20 at off-off-Broadway’s The Tank, it was modes of communication. From the micro-personal to the cosmic, both Jason Cady’s This Is Not About Natalie and Anna Heflin’s The INcomplete Cosmicomics featured a character desperate to make a faceless audience understand him or her.

Paired in an evening called “SOLOperas” (there was no consensus among EiO staff whether that should be pronounced as written or as “solo operas”), the works were presented in a small black-box space with audience on three sides and very little onstage, and only one performer per opera. Well, sort of.

Daniels was in for an Olympian vocal workout for the entire 30-minute opera.

Kris, the main character in This Is Not About Natalie, is a punk-rock songwriter with a singing ventriloquist dummy. It was momentarily disappointing to realize that the fabulous soprano Sarah Daniels had not found some physiology-defying way to sing operatically without moving her lips. Instead (and quite logically), Daniels’ doll, named Sunny, had a playback device under its little frock and pre-recorded vocals by Daniels at the ready. Director Shannon Sindelar helped make the interaction between the singer and her hand- and psyche-extension seem natural and humorous, playing with the constant static of the ego against the id.

The other aspect of communication in Cady’s opera is Kris’ relationship with her viewers: She makes songs for a daily YouTube video series. We find her just starting this enterprise, having recently split with her longtime performing partner, the Natalie mentioned in the opera’s title. A tripod holding an iPhone downstage center is the focus of her attention; she sings her rock songs (marked as “arias” in the libretto) and checks the comments and emojis. Her viewers want her to talk about why she broke up with Natalie. Sunny does, too. Only Kris is determined to ignore the issue clearly weighing on her.

Turns out Natalie only wanted success, whereas Kris wants artistic integrity. Until the end, that is, when the growing viewership of Kris’ show prompts Natalie to invite her on tour as an opening act. Kris coyly acknowledges her own hypocrisy, her willingness to jump onto the very bandwagon she’s been disparaging. After a climax in which Sunny’s playback box multiplies the puppet’s voice five-fold, the word “harmony” is reduced to its essential last two syllables: money. The opera’s plot rang true as a representation of most struggling, idealistic artists.

Daniels has a powerful yet flexible voice. Although she wasn’t singing both Kris’ and Sunny’s parts live, she was in for an Olympian vocal workout for the entire 30-minute opera, constantly bombarded by a blaring synthesizer score, not to mention her own electric guitar, which she played live during her arias. More stylistic differentiation — perhaps some moments of contrasting melody types — would have been welcome. Interestingly, despite the up-to-the-moment aspects of both score and story, Cady sticks to definitions of recitative (conversational language that moves the plot along), arioso (more stylized conversation, in this case with clever internal rhymes), and aria (songs exploring the character’s emotions) that have been standard since the 17th century.

—Anne E. Johnson, Classical Voice North America, March 23, 2025

Jason Cady wrote the libretto and music for This is Not About Natalie. He stretches the notion of solo opera a bit, since Sunny, a ventriloquist’s dummy, is too real a presence to be dismissed. The human is singer/songwriter Kris, who was once half of an underground duo with Natalie. The act has dissolved, and Natalie is now a star as a solo performer. Kris, just a little green with envy, is struggling to pay the bills and tenaciously clinging to not having compromised her values by selling out. It seems no one made her an offer.

Kris is posting a daily video of her singing a new song preceded by some back and forth with Sunny, who also serves as confident, therapist and reality check. The videos are equal parts self-promotion, confessional and a cry for attention. Kris counts the likes and despairs over the haters, but she really wants to know if Natalie is watching. The answer comes when the number of clicks start climbing, and Natalie reaches out to her. Recognition on her terms makes the prospect of making money awfully sweet.

The multi-talented Sarah Daniels, who was terrific as the title character in EIO’s Chunky in Heat (click here) in 2019, literally rocks it as Kris. Doing triple duty as singer, guitarist and ventriloquist, Daniels masks Kris’s emotional fragility with a veneer of pride that is already starting to fray around the edges. Sunny is a bit of an opera singer, so Daniels tosses off some coloratura and the like. She is even better performing Kris’s soul-baring pop songs.

Cady scored This Is Not About Natalie for electric guitar, modular synthesizer, synthesizer bass and a drum machine. It is a mix that can be extraordinary complex or as smooth as a pop ballad, which suits the character whom he created. Kris is talented, self-absorbed and a survivor: the portrait of any artist with ambition and a dream.

—Rick Perdian, Seen and Heard International, April 28, 2025

For 25 years now, Experiments in Opera has presented inventive, brains before budget productions. And in March, they prove once again that opera can be enjoyable with a double bill of short works for single performers. SOLOperas., in a three night run at New York’s The Tank presents a pair of works about isolated performers narrating their own existence - one trapped in her bedroom, the other alone in the universe, both addressing audiences who aren’t physically present.

EIO co-founder Jason Cady’s This is Not About Natalie concerns a Gen X songwriter ageing out of the role she’s imagined for herself. After the dissolution of her duo Kris & Natalie, Kris is posting daily songs to her small online audience. She seeks comfort in comments and emojis while sparring with Sunny, her ventriloquist doll nemesis.

Cady puts his story firmy in the current day. “I want to be the Pussy Riot of Fugazi of the experimental fringe,” Kris announces. Her sarcastic dummy affirms her desires, proclaiming (in her voice) that underground music will surely make the world a better place. The preprecorded synth score comes off a chessy 1980s Casiotone, through which Cady smartly weaves motifs as well as Kris’s performances. In so doing, he crafts a convincing operatic, Muzak-infused pop-punk.

Sarah Daniels is entirely convincing as a riot grrrl in a diva’s voice. Kris seems poised for a psychic breakdown, as tends to happen when ventriloquist dolls are involved. But in the end, she decides to cease her daily song posting and go outside, as Sunny’s voice multiplies into two, three, four, five part harmonies. She leaves the room, but it’s hard to believe she doesn’t take her troubles with her.

—Kurt Gottschalk, The Wire, May 2025

The first opera followed an unsuccessful musician feeling bad about her ex-music partner who became successful and moved on from their band. The story was told by way of daily vlogs that included conversations with a puppet - performer Sarah Daniels (photo above by Reuben Radding) did a great job, singing varied types of music, sometimes accompanying herself on electric guitar, and interacting with the ventriloquist puppet (whose voice had been pre-recorded, along with some accompaniment music, which was mostly kind of synth-pop). I thought it was interesting and pretty fun that the texture of the music - including songs performed as if they were kind of indie pop or rock - were being sung operatically, which somehow on the whole worked pretty well. The piece was clever, though transparent, and well executed.

—Shoshana Klein, Oberon’s Grove, March 20, 2025