Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn
October 11, 2018

The rain was beating an appropriate tattoo last night as we sat in a dank and gloomy catacomb watching Gothic horrors sprung from the pens of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. I’m not sure which was more disturbing, the drama, the drip, drip, drip in the empty vault next to me, or the dozen or so of the dead enjoying their eternal rest in the family vault to my right. What I do know is that this was the season finale of one of the most original site-specific projects in New York and, despite the occasional fit of the terrors, a brilliantly conceived evening to remember.

Joshua Jeremiah in Sketches of Frankenstein. Photo © Kevin Condon

Opera in a cemetery may seem a macabre idea, but it’s par for the course for Andrew Ousley, the fecund brains behind The Angel’s Share, a series of ghoulishly-themed concerts featuring leading lights of the classical music world and set in the magnificent gloom of the Catacombs in the heart of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Thoroughly fortified thanks to a pre-concert whiskey tasting...