Submitted Photo Carlos Vieira will bring “Orpheus in the Underworld” to Anne Nicole Nelson Hall, Friday evening and Sunday afternoon.

As Jupiter, the king of the mythological gods, 6′ 5″ Carlos Vieira towers above all on stage, with a voice and energy to match his size. A powerful baritone, Vieira differs from the other professional lead singers in this weekend’s “Orpheus in the Underworld” in only one important aspect, this Brazilian baritone belongs to Minot, which he calls, a “city that has so much” and “it’s so cheap here” referring to ticket prices for really high quality entertainment such as “Orpheus.”

Vieira is in his second year as the head of choral studies at Minot State, and as a choral director and voice professor as you might expect he is an excellent singer. But before he finished his doctorate in choral studies he had a lot of experience in Brazil and other places as an opera singer and performer. So, now, after a year of waiting, Minot audiences will get the chance to see this “force of culture” onstage at Anne Nicole Nelson Hall, Friday evening and Sunday afternoon.

Joining Vieira and the large cast of students and community folk, is his wife, Laticia, a wonderful dancer, who joins the can-can dancers for Orpheus’s most famous tune, the “Galop” or Can-Can. (This is a tune you still hear all the time at baseball games and other sporting events.) The dance is just the appropriate climax of the show’s storyline, which is a comical twist on the traditional Greek myth about the musician Orpheus who tries to bring his wife back from the land of the dead.

The farcical plot of this wonderful “operetta,” set as the title says, in the “underworld,” has it own crazy “logic” and “down below” is a place where all they seem to do is dance and party. In Western Plains Opera’s new version, Vieira’s accented English adds a really humorous twist to the comical dialogue

Vieira grew up in Brazil the son of a Methodist minister father and musician mother. Because of the nature of his father’s job they moved around Brazil approximately every four years. He started singing in church as a three-year-old and never quit. His singing and singing studies took him all over the world. His longest gig was as the director of choirs for a very large traditionally protestant church in Brazil for 11 years from which job he could take operatic roles as well. As it happened, in Minot, Efrain Amaya, a Venezuelan, had taken over as the conductor of the Minot Symphony. After the hiring of Vieira, Minot State was in the unique position of having two of its most important music faculty South Americans. Since then, Vieira and Amaya have taken over the duties of co-General Directors of the Western Plains Opera company. The South American and Latin American connections have proven beneficial for WPO.

This year they brought in world-class tenors David Guzman from Colombia although now from New York, and Carlos Feliciano, a Latin American, but not South American, a Puerto Rican, who is currently from Arizona although formerly New York and Pittsburgh. These guests are extraordinary singers. They are combined with Clara Rottsolk, a great soprano with wonderful abilities as a comic actress, who hails from Philadelphia. Thus, the show’s cast is professional and of the highest quality, Minot can be proud that among the leads is our own “force of culture,” Carlos de Silva Vieira. Proud of the community and this show, he notes that “Minot is a very special place with the ability to produce high quality productions such as this one.”