Two Columbia-Affiliated Opera Projects Selected as Finalists for the VOX American Voices Opera Lab

Two operas by Columbia-affiliated artists have been selected as finalists for the VOX American Voice Opera Lab: The Wedding Banquet by Professor of Professional Practice in Film and Media Studies James Schamus and composer Huang Ruo; and Desert Bloom by Mo Holmes '26 with a score composed by Gillian Rae Perry.

VOX Opera Lab is a recently relaunched initiative dedicated to cultivating the future of opera. The initiative is supported by seven different musical organizations throughout New York City, including American Composers Orchestra, Beth Morrison Projects, MasterVoices, Manhattan School of Music, and Perelman Arts Center (PAC NYC). The finalists of the Opera Lab are given the opportunity to present a 20–30 minute excerpt of their full work on the stages of PAC NYC—a necessary step in the workshopping process for full-length operas. 

The Wedding Banquet

Schamus has a history with the opera’s source material as co-writer of both film versions of The Wedding Banquet: the 1993 version directed by Ang Lee and the 2025 version directed by Andrew Ahn. The opera follows the same plot line of the 2025 film where two same-sex couples—Mei and Izzy, a lesbian couple attempting to have a baby via IVF, and Chris and Min, a gay couple experiencing relationship woes—find themselves unexpectedly intertwined. The 2025 film featured actors Bowen Yang and Lily Gladstone. 

While Schamus’s collaborator Huang Ruo has composed eight operas, including three projects with Tony-winner Professor Emeritus of Theatre David Henry Hwang, this is Schamus’s first foray into the medium. Speaking to Playbill last October, Schamus said: “I am excited about the surprising new discoveries we’ve made by adapting this story to the opera stage. Opera allows you to explore the inner lives of your characters in ways that cinema does not, so you have more access to their full range of emotional expression. The characters get to work out how they’re feeling in real time.” The Wedding Banquet is set to premiere in Seattle—where the plot is also set—in January 2027 before transferring to New York as part of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2027–28 season. 

James Schamus is a screenwriter, producer, director, and film scholar. Schamus was the CEO of Focus Features and has previously collaborated with Ang Lee on two films, wrote the screenplay for The Ice Storm, and served as producer on Brokeback Mountain. Other credits include his directorial debut Indignation, an adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel, which starred Logan Lerman and Tracey Letts and premiered at the Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals. Schamus was the creator, executive producer, and showrunner of the Mexican limited series Somos for Netflix. He runs the New York-based production company Symbolic Exchange and served as a consulting producer on the Netflix series The Boroughs. Schamus also served on the negotiating committee of the Writers Guild of America during their successful five-month strike. At Columbia, he teaches film history and theory. 

Huang Ruo grew up in Hainan, China, where he studied piano and composition with his father before training in Shanghai and the United States, training at both the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and Juilliard. His musical language brings Chinese traditions into conversation with experimental sound, rock, and jazz through an approach he calls “Dimensionalism.” Across opera, concert music, and multimedia work, he treats these influences as parts of a single, fluid artistic vocabulary. The Wedding Banquet will be his debut at The Met.

Desert Bloom

Desert Bloom follows Mia as she grieves for her mother and meets Teo, “whose spirit has been trapped for a century at the graveside of her friend and mentor Ángel, a soldadera who fought in the Mexican Revolution,” Holmes explained over email. Encountering this woman devoted to a past love, Mia is confronted with the state of her own life: “Will Mia cross the divine border to join the one she loves?” Holmes posited. Holmes and Perry first created Desert Bloom as a 10-minute piece based on a writing prompt for the Atlanta Opera’s 2025 96-Hour Opera Project. The exercise asked participants to create a scene based on Pyramus and Thisbe, a myth that explores questions of communication across boundaries, which is considered the source material for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. “We got to know each other through collaborating,” Holmes said of her work with Perry. “We are both from Texas, so decided to tell a Texas story.”  

At the Atlanta Opera, the team won the Audience Favorite Award, allowing them to develop the work into a full-length piece. Perry also received the 2026 Discovery Grant from Opera America to support the continual development of Desert Bloom. Holmes and Perry will also participate in this year’s Snap Shot Opera Festival through West Edge Opera in Berkeley, California, with public performances on February 27 and 28, 2027. Tickets for that event can be purchased here. 

Mo Holmes is a Black queer Southern playwright, librettist, and dramaturg, born in San Antonio and raised between Texas and Alabama. She is the 2026 recipient of the Yale Drama Prize for her play Amanda, based on Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. She is also the winner of the Alpine Fellowship Theatre Prize, the Next Wave Initiative Lorraine Hansberry Award, and a finalist for the Jane Chambers Award. Holmes’s work has been developed for or presented by The Bushwick Starr, The Fire This Time Festival, the Sam French Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival, and Good Apples Collective (co-founded by Sophie McIntosh '25) in New York, as well as the Playwrights’ Center, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Minnesota Opera, the Atlanta Opera, and DePaul University's Climate Action New Play Collective, among others. As a dramaturg, Holmes has supported new play development at Good Apples Collective, the Guthrie Theater, Jungle Theater, and Horizon Theatre Company.   

Gillian Rae Perry is a composer and songwriter whose work examines themes of mental health, vulnerability, and forging intimacy. Perry’s music has been described as “sweet and sensitive” by Parterre Box as well as “gentle, introspective, caring, important, and beautiful” by Music City Review. Perry grew up on a rural bird farm in Texas and wrote her first composition for the birds. With a background in film as well as music, Perry integrates art from outside her immediate medium into her practice. She is the laureate of the Antinori Foundation Grand Prize at the Atlanta Opera’s New Works Festival for her chamber opera The Sickness with librettist David Davila. The Sickness will premiere by the Atlanta Opera in June of 2028. Currently, Perry studies with Kevin Puts at the Peabody Institute.

Performances of the VOX Showcase at Perelman Center for The Arts will take place on Thursday, April 1, 2027. There will be a Works & Process event at the Guggenheim Museum of Art about the history and relaunch of VOX on November 16 at 7 pm. The event will feature representatives of participating institutions and a brief performance of each of the finalists’ work, as well as performances by the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. Tickets for the event can be purchased here.