Original Release: 2003
Released on
Composers Recordings Incorporated (CRI)
(CRI 902)
Carolann Page as Doll
Paul Kreider as Dumdum
Patrick Jones as Taco
Charles Maxwell as Vera
Daron Hagen, executive producer
Benjamin Milstein, producer

"Vera of Las Vegas is an emotional and very original piece of music, and altogether rather powerful." --- The Irish Literary Supplement

"An entertaining and provocative opera by Composer Daron Hagen and Librettist Paul Muldoon. The clever story mixes sleazy culture and big questions, while the contemporary music has many references to 20th century pop and stage music." --- BehindtheBeat.net

”The piece is both an homage to and critique of the eponymous squalid city's "house always wins" zeitgeist. Its billing as a "Nightmare Cabaret Opera in One Act" is something of a misnomer: it is not epic enough to be opera, not incisive or brutal enough to be cabaret, and not freakish and confusing enough to be a nightmare. Instead, it works out as a mostly-successful experiment and an intriguing but peculiar piece of operatic derring-do. --- ClassicsToday.com, Daniel Felsenfeld

"This is not the kind of thing singers get trained to do in conservatories... Mr. Hagen blends brassy jazz, crunchy contemporary riffs, wordy recitatives, lyrical outpourings, choralelike choruses for the Catchalls and flashes of cabaret music into his fitful score...you cannot deny the theatrical audacity of ''Vera of Las Vegas,'' which elicited many cheers from the packed house." --- The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini

"Daron Hagen's Vera of Las Vegas is a gutsy, occasionally trashy cabaret opera, which details the fateful intersection of two on-the-lam IRA opertatives and a Las Vegas lap dancer who has a "little secret" of her own." --- Time Out New York

"Hagen describes the work as a “postmodern meditation on the death of love,” but, whatever his thematic intent, the eclecticism of the music is dazzling: sharply pointed jazz lines are overlaid with slippery atonal harmony; a plaintive nineteen-seventies folk-rock ballad melds into a Broadway power anthem." --- The New Yorker

"Hagen's opera equally captures all the smuttiness, desperation, and humanity of the characters with a quippy flair. The music is truly a canonical hybrid of opera and popular forms, with vocal writing that periodically swings and radiates a sultry, burlesque feel." --- NewMusicBox.com, Randy Nordschow