Opera star from Federal Way finds the right funny mix

Published 11:30 am Saturday, August 16, 2025

If you don’t consider yourself a fan of the opera, you just might be the ideal audience for the upcoming GALApalooza event at 7:30 p.m Aug. 23 at the Urban Grace Church, 902 Market St. in Tacoma.

The show is described as a “palate cleanser from the state of the world today,” a “retro variety show where cabaret meets comedy,” and “live music, satirical sketches, character cameos, improv games and a whole lot of fun” where “nothing is sacred, but everything sings.”

The show is put together by organization Opera Unbound and stems mostly from the creative mind of Rob McPherson, a world-class and Grammy award winning opera singer from Federal Way.

The full cast also includes founders of Opera Unbound, Mike Heitmann and Rachelle Moss, as well as the talent of Ivy Zhou, John B. Cooper and David McDade.

McPherson’s most recent show in his hometown was in 2015, where he performed a career retrospective before embarking on a stint as part of the prestigious Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

Since then, his talent has taken him around the world. The COVID-19 pandemic forced his career to change course, and he has since found a niche bridging the worlds of comedy and opera with his alter ego, the Drunken Tenor.

Opera Unbound had a similar catalyst and began as a podcast that founders Mike Heitmann and Rachelle Moss used to talk about opera during the height of the pandemic.

It has now evolved into a nonprofit that puts on unconventional opera events, taking the art form out of opulent opera houses and into locations like bars, churches, community centers and porches.

McPherson and the Opera Unbound organization have similar goals, but different approaches.

They are both on a mission to make the world of opera more accessible. McPherson typically does this through comedy, while Opera Unbound focuses on updating and modernizing operas to bring together classical art forms with modern sensibilities.

McPherson will be tapping into similar satirical shenanigans with an upcoming performance with Kent’s Theatre Battery in a presentation of “The Threepenny Opera” at Kent Station shopping center.

While Mcpherson enjoys blending comedy and opera, he said he makes sure that his character is the butt of the joke, not the art form itself.

“I love opera. I’ve given my life to it. I think it’s amazing. So I never try to make a joke of the art form. It’s trying to find humor within it,” McPherson said.

Underneath all the fun and games of the Drunken Tenor, his love for the art form takes center stage.

“I think opera has the potential to have an impact that people don’t expect. We’re in a society right now where everything is digital, amplified, extreme. Opera is one of the last vestiges of unamplified vocal performance,” McPherson said. “I feel when I have to put a sound system between me and you, there’s an immediacy that goes away.”

While of course he doesn’t see amplification as a bad thing necessarily, he highlighted the special and now rare experience of hearing the “unamplified, unfiltered, unvarnished human voice.”

“I can see people when they actually feel sound waves hit them. If you’ve never experienced the unamplified human voice filling a hall, it’s an amazing experience,” McPherson said.

Another thing that stands out to him about opera is the relevance of the storylines of classical operas to modern life, the same stories of love, jealousy and betrayal that have been the heart of the drama of performance art for the centuries since the genre began.

This modern relevance is a core part of Opera Unbound’s mode of connection to new audiences.

Just one example is the upcoming show that will be funded by the GALApalooza fundraiser titled “Kaffee Kantate,” a modern twist of a Bach comedic cantata from the 1700s about an addiction to coffee.

Heitmann has done a variety of modern, shortened opera adaptations including a version of “La Belle Helene” with a desperate housewives twist.

In another show, this time with Puget Sound Concert Opera, he turned a Pauline Viareot story of “Cinderella” into a modern story similar to “The Bachelor.”

He’s also taken on serious modern topics like the issue of campus rape culture, which he explored in a version of “Don Giovanni” by Mozart.

Opera Unbound’s mission is not just to bring opera to more audiences, but also to provide living-wage opportunities to local opera artists.

“Most people who do opera have a master’s degree if not a doctorate in it,” Heitmann told the Mirror. He went on to describe how many local productions will recruit talent outside of the region, even when there are world-class performers right here at home.

“A lot of people think that opera is just people standing there and singing, like a bunch of overweight people standing there yelling at each other in Italian,” Heitmann said. Instead, he said a better way to think of opera is “musical theatre on steroids.”

He encouraged people to think about their favorite TV show or film and how different it would be if the musical score were gone.

“If you watched any movie and took away all of the underscore, it would have so much less impact on you,” he said, noting how much the music affects audiences emotionally. With opera, “you can communicate so much more when you sing it than when you say it,” he said, adding that it “hits your heartstrings a lot more.”