If you want proof that the the borders of classical music just keep getting more porous, you need look no further than Three Lost Chords, a one-hour show that has been playing at the offbeat little Zipper Theater on Wednesdays and Sundays since March 23. The Zipper is a tiny space in the garment district big enough for perhaps 75 audience members, who sit in vinyl two-seaters from 1950s-era buses; adjacent to the theater there’s also the funky Zipper Tavern with twinkly lights and shabby-chic furniture like slip-covered loveseats and wooden chests. Not your ordinary opera venue.

This macabre/funny/over-the-top trio of short monologue operas with music by Lance Horne and libretto by Mark Stephen Campbell, directed by David Schweizer, had a run at the Zipper in January and is now back for a brief reprise. The composer—who also plays piano in this one-hour show—studied with Milton Babbitt and David Del Tredici at Juilliard, and he cites some of his influences John Lennon, David Bowie, Fiona Apple, Benjamin Britten, and the Captain & Tennille (!). He also has a band, Lance Horne and the One-Night Stands .

The three singers in the show each portray a character based on short stories: Franz Kafka’s A Hunger Artist (about the predicament of a man who hates food), Muriel Spark’s The Girl I Left Behind (about a young woman struggling with a strange kind of memory loss), and Edgar Allan Poe’s well-known A Tell-Tale Heart. Nathan Lee Graham, with a resume that is a mix of television and movie roles, Broadway, and classical, portrays Kafka’s hunger artist, while Michael Slattery (Poe’s guilt-plagued murderer) and Caroline Worra (the woman trying to remember what she is missing) are both well established in the classical universe. read more