If you want to send 2025 out with a bang, Maestro Brian Asher Alhadeff and OperaSLO have just the ticket for you on Wednesday, Dec. 31, at the Performing Arts Center in San Luis Obispo.
“We have an amazing New Year’s Eve show,” Alhadeff said during a recent Zoom call. “Hold on a second. I can actually show you one thing. The whole show sort of started with this,” he added, disappearing off camera before returning with a gleaming gold and silver Viking-style helmet replete with eight-point deer antlers.
Celebrate New Year’s Eve in high style
OperaSLO presents its New Year’s Eve Super Gala in the Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, Dec. 31 (7 p.m.; ages 5 and older; $34 to $90 at pacslo.org). Expect an evening of pops, opera, musical theater, and dance featuring a countywide collaboration of various arts organizations.
“Just to show you how fun my job is, this was the inspiration for my show,” he laughed as he placed the helmet on his head. “If that doesn’t say opera instantly, I’m not sure what does.”
Alhadeff—who always seems excited about whatever show he’s mounting, and he’s mounted some doozies—was especially excited about this one because it will contain an important and spectacular SLO County first.
“Do you remember the scene in Apocalypse Now where all the helicopters are coming in and the music that accompanied that?” Alhadeff asked.
It was Ride of the Valkyries, Richard Wagner’s epic 1851 prelude to Die Walküren, the second of four music dramas that constituted the operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen.
“That was the starting point because once you program Ride of the Valkyries, there’s almost no show you can’t do. It has the biggest orchestra you can imagine. It uses eight sopranos, and so from that alone, the sky’s the limit on everything else.”
According to Alhadeff, the show will mark the Central Coast premiere of Wagner’s iconic score, and each soprano—or if you want to be more specific, each of the four sopranos, three mezzos, and a contralto—“will have their own unique Wagnerian helmet and matching weapon,” Alhadeff noted. “They’ll all converge onto the center stage in this magnificent debut of a piece that I just can’t believe has never been heard in town before.”
As Alhadeff noted, he’s “pulled out all the stops for this show,” which is really a group effort.
“OperaSLO is a community arts unifier,” he explained. “We’re the Olympics of classical music, and when we have an opportunity to produce a gala, it’s almost always a community arts variety show. I mean, there’s sort of a cheapness to [‘variety show’]. I’m going to leave it you, the writer, to find a better way of saying ‘variety show.’”
How about this? OperaSLO’s New Year’s Eve Super Gala will be a stirring collaboration of the Central Coast’s finest performing arts groups working in unison to present a selection of unforgettable and eclectic opera, Broadway, and Hollywood pieces of music and movement.
“It’s an opportunity for us to celebrate the major arts organizations in the county in a beautiful environment accompanied by a massive professional orchestra,” Alhadeff explained.
Central Coast Gilbert and Sullivan will be doing selections from their past Pirates of Penzance show as well as something from their next show, The Sorcerer. Paso’s Applause Children’s Theater, which Alhadeff calls “hottest kids’ group on the whole coast,” will do “Do, Re, Mi” from their recent production of The Sound of Music, a show Alhadeff plans to do “a grand production of” in the future.
“We’re celebrating the best of SLO, and we’re also forecasting and sharing with the public where we want to go in the future,” he said.
The Cuesta College Concord Chorus is also involved, and Alhadeff has brought in a total of 13 soloists—all incredible talents performing a variety of pieces. The OperaSLO Grand Orchestra—made up of first chairs of the SLO Symphony, Festival Mozaic, Orchestra Novo, and Santa Maria Philharmonic—is a behemoth in and of itself, featuring the best Central Coast players as well as talent brought in from “studio musicians from the LA Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, the Hollywood studios.” It’s truly an all-star orchestra.
Credit: PHOTO COURTESY OF OPERA SAN LUIS OBISPO
There’s also the OperaSLO Children’s Chorus, which first formed in 2024 for the production of Carmen. Earlier this year, they were the Munchkins for OperaSLO’s The Wizard of Oz.
“They were so successful in Carmen that Yes artist Jon Anderson saw them, and somehow he got word to David Benoit who was doing A Charlie Brown Christmas at the Clark Center and asked if they would join forces with him,” Alhadeff said. “Do you remember The Cannonball Run?”
The 1981 Burt Reynolds comedy follows a group of eccentrics participating in an illegal cross-country road race.
“You probably didn’t stick around to see the end titles, but this amazing song for kids called ‘You’ve Gotta Have a Dream’ is played while the titles are coming up,” Alhadeff continued. “It was performed by the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus back in 1981, so we had that orchestrated for our kids to perform on New Year’s Eve.”
The Children’s Chorus is a bit of a family affair. It’s managed by Alhadeff’s wife, Luana Gerardis-Alhadeff, who’s also in charge of marketing for OperaSLO, and their two children are performers. And come on, who can resist the charm of a children’s choir with their high, heavenly voices?
The Chidren’s Chorus is directed by Kristina Horacek-Prozesky, but Gerardis-Alhadeff oversees keeping the children organized and focused “so they can do the best they possibly can do onstage,” she said during a recent phone call.
One young performer in particular is no doubt getting extra scrutiny—the Alhadeffs’ daughter, Eva.
“She was a soloist for the Lompoc Pops Orchestra and she’s going to be singing ‘Shy,’ from Once Upon a Mattress,” Gerardis-Alhadeff explained. “It’s a really difficult piece of music to sing that’s full of triplets. She’ll be singing it with the full orchestra, and she’s only 11. So that’s going to be new for us, having such a young soloist. She was our Chip in Beauty and the Beast.”
Between Ride of the Valkyries, Broadway and Hollywood show tunes, the massive orchestra, all the soloists, and the Cuesta and kids’ choruses, this sounds like an amazing way to kiss 2025 goodbye.
“Have you ever heard of The Proms concerts over in in England?” Gerardis-Alhadeff asked. “They have the beautiful Royal Albert Hall and it’s a mix of Broadway and opera, and they put on a show. It’s something very similar, except what we’re doing is uniting different arts organizations around the Central Coast. We have all these different organizations and soloists coming together to showcase and put their best foot forward. What the audience can expect is a Prom-style event that has the cream of the cream of every organization here showing off. So, we’re basically showing off! Showing off our kids, all our soloists, and the different groups that we have in such an arts-rich community.”
Miss this one at your peril! ∆
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Dec 25, 2025 – Jan 1, 2026.