WOMAN: A Modern Frauenliebe und Leben is a genre-defying solo performance where art song recital, cabaret, and autobiographical storytelling collide. Through music, spoken narrative, and theatrical framing, the show reexamines what it has meant—and what it means now—to be a woman, onstage and in the world.

Inspired by Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben, a 19th-century song cycle that reduces a woman’s life to love, marriage, and motherhood, the first act responds in dialogue and dissent. Beginning with Schumann’s music, the performance expands outward to reveal the complexity, contradiction, resilience, and wit that have always defined women’s lives—often in spite of how they were portrayed by men. Along the way, we encounter the real women behind the myths, including Clara Schumann and the wild west’s Calamity Jane.

Act One moves through centuries of music by Robert Schumann, Barbara Strozzi, Henry Purcell, Manuel de Falla, and Libby Larsen, illuminating feminine archetypes not as ideals, but as lived realities—messy, powerful, and deeply human.

Act Two turns inward and forward, tracing the performer’s own womanhood through three lenses: Woman as Descendant, exploring Choctaw roots and Native American art song by Louis Ballard; Woman as Lover, through musical theatre and art song by Arlen, Britten, Heggie, Loesser, Strouse, Adams, and Reynolds; and Woman as Teacher and Mother, reflecting legacy, care, and chosen responsibility.

At its heart, the show invites audiences to ask:What kind of woman would YOU have been throughout history—and what kind of woman would you be now?