Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera

Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera is a nonprofit professional theater company based in the Cultural District of Downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

Pittsburgh CLO stages productions of musical theater classics, drawing more than 200,000 patrons each year; its annual budget is nearly $10 million.

Established on 20 February 1946, it premiered at Pitt Stadium on 3 June 1946, where it offered outdoor performances until 1958. In 1961, the Civic Arena, was built to house the CLO. The arena, former home of the Pittsburgh Hornets (AHL, 1961-67) and the Pittsburgh Penguins (NHL, 1967-2010) hockey franchises, is covered by the world's first retractable roof, designed so that audiences might enjoy theater under the stars.In 1973 the company moved to the newly renovated former Penn Theatre that was now called Heinz Hall. The company moved to the Benedum Center in 1988. CLO opened its newest venue in 2004, The CLO Cabaret at Theater Square.

Pittsburgh CLO's history began when Abraham Lewis Wolk, a Pittsburgh City Councilman, attended a performance of the St. Louis Municipal Opera, the first American summertime musical theater. Wolk wanted to copy the idea, and after discussions with Pittsburgh retail magnate Edgar J. Kaufmann, who helped with financing, Pittsburgh CLO was established.

Comic opera

Comic opera denotes a sung dramatic work of a light or comic nature, usually with a happy ending.

Forms of comic opera first developed in late 17th-century Italy. By the 1730s, a new operatic genre, opera buffa, emerged as an alternative to opera seria. It quickly made its way to France, where it became opéra bouffon, and eventually, in the following century, French operetta, with Jacques Offenbach as its most accomplished practitioner.

The influence of the Italian and French forms spread to other parts of Europe. Many countries developed their own genres of comic opera, incorporating the Italian and French models along with their own musical traditions. Examples include Viennese operetta, German singspiel, Spanish zarzuela, Russian comic opera, English ballad opera, and Savoy Opera.

Italian comic opera

In late 17th-century Italy, light-hearted musical plays began to be offered as an alternative to weightier opera seria (17th-century Italian opera based on classical mythology). Il Trespolo tutore (1679) by Alessandro Stradella (1639–1682) was an early precursor of opera buffa. The opera has a farcical plot, and the characters of the ridiculous guardian Trespolo and the maid Despina are prototypes of characters widely used later in the opera buffa genre.

Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh (/ˈpɪtsbərɡ/ PITS-burg) is the second largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania with a population of 305,842 and the county seat of Allegheny County. The Combined Statistical Area (CSA) population of 2,659,937 is the largest in both the Ohio Valley and Appalachia and the 20th-largest in the U.S. Pittsburgh is known as both "the Steel City" for its more than 300 steel-related businesses, as well as "the City of Bridges" for its 446 bridges. The city features 30 skyscrapers, 2 inclines, a pre-revolutionary fortification and the source of the Ohio River at the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers. This vital link of the Atlantic coast and Midwest through the mineral-rich Alleghenies made the area coveted by the French and British Empires, Virginia, Whiskey Rebels, Civil War raiders and media networks.

Aside from steel, Pittsburgh has led in aluminum, glass, shipbuilding, petroleum, foods, sports, transportation, computing, autos, and electronics. For much of the 20th century, Pittsburgh was behind only New York and Chicago in corporate headquarters employment, second to New York in bank assets and with the most U.S. stockholders per capita. America's 1980s deindustrialization laid off area blue-collar workers and thousands of downtown white-collar workers when the longtime Pittsburgh-based world headquarters of Gulf Oil, Sunbeam, Rockwell and Westinghouse moved. This heritage left the area with renowned museums, medical centers,parks, research centers, libraries, a diverse cultural district and the most bars per capita in the U.S. In 2015, Pittsburgh was named on a list of the "eleven most livable cities in the world."

University of Pittsburgh

The University of Pittsburgh (commonly referred to as Pitt) is a state-related research university located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1787 after the American Revolutionary War, it was founded on the edge of the American frontier as the Pittsburgh Academy. It developed and was renamed as Western University of Pennsylvania by a change to its charter in 1819. After surviving two devastating fires and various relocations within the area, the school moved to its current location in the Oakland neighborhood of the city; it was renamed as the University of Pittsburgh in 1908. For most of its history, Pitt was a private institution, until 1966 when it became part of the Commonwealth System of Higher Education.

The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges located at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the university's central administration and 28,766 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. The university also includes four undergraduate schools located at campuses within Western Pennsylvania: Bradford, Greensburg, Johnstown, and Titusville. The 132-acre Pittsburgh campus has multiple contributing historic buildings of the Schenley Farms Historic District, most notably its 42-story Gothic revival centerpiece, the Cathedral of Learning. The campus is situated adjacent to the flagship medical facilities of its closely affiliated University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), as well as the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, Schenley Park, and Carnegie Mellon University.

List of Weeds episodes

The American dark comedy-drama series Weeds was created by Jenji Kohan and aired on premium cable channel Showtime. Mary-Louise Parker stars as Nancy Botwin, a suburban widow who begins selling marijuana to support her family. Elizabeth Perkins also starred as Nancy's neighbor, Celia Hodes, a manic PTA mother, but Perkins departed the series at the end of the fifth season. The show follows a serialized format and details Nancy's progressively deeper involvement in illegal activity as she takes care of her family.

The ten-episode first season premiered on August 5, 2005 and concluded on October 10, 2005. Season two, which comprises 12 episodes, began airing on August 14, 2006 and finished its run on October 30, 2006. The series' third season received an order of 15 episodes, premiered on August 13, 2007 and ran until November 20, 2007. The 13-episode fourth season premiered early the following summer on June 16, 2008 and concluded on September 15, 2008. Seasons one, two and three have been released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats in Regions 1, 2 and 4. At the 2008 Television Critics Association, it was announced that Weeds had been picked up for fifth and sixth seasons of 13 episodes each. An eighth and final season premiered in July 1, 2012 and concluded September 16, 2012.