[The Gonzales Cantata] is honestly, probably the coolest thing you've ever seen on this show. I know. I'm totally freaking out about it ... I spent all day obsessing about this, and watching clips of it online, and listening to the music, and I have to tell you, in my opinion, it is both great and kind of moving ... this is so cool, I could not contain myself.
-- Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show
Laertes' sister, Ophelia, is portrayed with real passion by Melissa Dunphy, the striking actress who last year hit bull's-eyes in two young-lover roles at the Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre. She is unquestionably the city's leading Shakespeare ingenue.
-- Philadelphia Inquirer
Another theme I’m very interested in is getting inside the heads of complicated antiheroes and finding a connection to them – a kind of empathy and love without necessarily a redemption. I think there’s value in that struggle as a way of dealing with history and understanding the present.
-- Interviews with Alicia Byer
Melissa Dunphy, 33, has presented major works using the self-produced Fringe Festival model, which could well happen with Ayn (about The Fountainhead author Ayn Rand), which, like Solitro, she's writing for doctoral requirements at Penn.
-- Philadelphia Inquirer
Then, there's Melissa Dunphy: a young and talented composer building her reputation as part of a new generation of Philadelphia composers one piece of a time.
-- Sound American
Peter Davison, the festival’s artistic director, said: “This will be a unique event. Melissa Dunphy’s piece received a standing ovation at its premiere performance and many were moved to tears."
-- Wirral News
The final piece on the program was Melissa Dunphy’s stunning 2010 “What Do You Think I Fought for at Omaha Beach?” Excerpts from veteran Philip Spooner’s testimony before the Maine Senate, in a hearing on the Marriage Equality Bill, its music ranges from the Coplandesque to the martial.
-- St. Louis Post-Dispatch
This piece demonstrates to me how a true artist is able to take even a most unlikely source of inspiration and yet create a new work of art from it.
-- St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Top Five Political Satires in Opera: Number 2. The Gonzales Cantata
-- WQXR Operavore
Best of all was Melissa Dunphy's "June." [...] The first of the two songs explored Lauren Rile Smith's poem about the lethargy of summer heat with great poetic control, neatly scaling back the electronic activity when necessary but ultimately conveying, with considerable mastery, the delirium of congested thought patterns. More, please.
-- Philadelphia Inquirer
Dunphy likes to put quotation marks around the words “classical” when talking about classical music. She’s interested in music, but especially “the way different genres influence me.” She says her best work is usually inspired by important public events.
-- Newburyport Arts
The final work of the evening was “Tesla’s Pigeon,” a new song cycle by the endlessly inventive Dunphy, whose smash-hit full-length oratorio The Gonzales Cantata rocked the 2009 Fringe Festival.
-- Penn Gazette
Make Major Moves got the Fringe veteran - Melissa presented her concert opera “The Gonzales Cantata” at Fringe 2009 -on the telephone to talk about Kanye West, the decline of the Philly Orchestra, the new classical scene, her rock band Up Your Cherry, and how Nikola Tesla fell in love with a bird.
-- Philadelphia Weekly: Make Major Moves
"All right, check out this amazing "Shot of the Morning" that's become a hit online: this teenage girl [sic] playing Bach's Prelude in C, and apparently it's so easy, she can do it upside down! At least her parents can't be mad at her for not practising her piano, right?"
-- Fox & Friends - Fox News
A newly commissioned work by Melissa Dunphy followed: “What do you think I fought for at Omaha Beach?” Dunphy’s music was exceptional, with supple lines effectively depicting the words of a veteran, and acerbic harmonies specifically setting the text “I’ve seen so much, so much blood and guts.”
-- Kansas City Star
Australian-born Melissa has already achieved a level of success and recognition on a national level, including a spot on The Rachel Maddow Show for another large choral work, The Gonzales Cantata.
-- KCMETROPOLIS.org
Macbeth shows Khan's willingness to experiment, focusing on Macbeth and his wife in a 90-minute paring driven by Melissa Dunphy's beautifully haunting music.
-- Philadelphia Citypaper
Simon Carrington gave his reasoning behind selecting Dunphy's work as the winner. "There were plenty of excellent pieces in the sweet-sounding modern idiom which SCCS would make very beautiful, but the strongest (and most individual) piece was Melissa Dunphy's What do you think I fought for at Omaha Beach? - a bold and highly effective setting of a thought-provoking text.
-- KCMETROPOLIS.org
Composer Melissa Dunphy has provided a soundscape for an assortment of exotic instruments played onstage: a Chinese ehru, Tibetan ringing bowls, and a varity of drums and gongs. The result not only heightens the atmosphere of the play, but in fact signals how we're supposed to feel about the action.
-- Philadelphia Inquirer
A few days before starting her doctoral studies at Penn, Melissa Dunphy Gr’14 woke up to discover that she was a celebrity. The torrent of interviews and articles wasn’t confined to the arts and culture sections, either. Instead, the 29-year-old composer’s name was popping up on everything from the Huffington Post to Fox News.
-- The Pennsylvania Gazette
Fellow graduate student Thomas Patteson, who attended one of the performances, observes, “The Gonzales Cantata is effective both as a work of art—the music is exquisite—and as mordant political commentary.”
-- University of Pennsylvania SAS Frontiers
...confident, charged composition and orchestration, [with] pragmatic inventiveness in the cantata's construction, [and] frequent wittiness and use of irony.
-- J's Theater
Her Gonzales Cantata - more PDQ Bach than Nixon in China - uses Handel's formality and symmetry as a starting point, humorously colliding with Gonzales' anything-but-symmetrical train of thought, quoted from the 2007 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings
-- The Philadelphia Inquirer
Take heed, folks, not only should you go see this work – you should examine how this 29-year-old graduate student has received more press about her cantata than most major composers do when they win the Pulitzer Prize
-- Sequenza21
Lovely conductor/composer Melissa Dunphy has seamlessly re-created former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ 2007 judiciary hearings as an opera, with epic results.
-- CityPaper (Philadelphia)
Dunphy is just as passionate about politics as she is about the arts. She veers away from musical theory to cheer on Barney Frank for his blunt comments at a recent health care town hall. But she does not espouse any political bent in the opera.
-- Edge Philadelphia
The career path of Alberto Gonzales provides perfect material for an opera in the tradition of George Frederick Handel. It has its earnest moments, flashes of heroism (involving Gonzales’s victims, of course, not the protagonist), and yet there is a steady undercurrent of opera buffa.
-- Harper's Magazine
Every word in composer Melissa Dunphy's 40-minute choral production comes from Gonzales' Senate testimony. They never sounded more beautiful (Except maybe to the ears of relieved Team Bush members back in the White House) than when they are sung, especially by this bunch.
-- The Chicago Tribune
And if congressional hearings are your idea of a good time - aren't they all - a theater in Philadelphia has a night on the town for you.
-- Fox News
[The Gonzales Cantata] is honestly, probably the coolest thing you've ever seen on this show. I know. I'm totally freaking out about it ... I spent all day obsessing about this, and watching clips of it online, and listening to the music, and I have to tell you, in my opinion, it is both great and kind of moving ... this is so cool, I could not contain myself.
-- The Rachel Maddow Show - MSNBC
I’ve had both Republicans and Democrats come to the show and remark that it really wasn’t about party politics. It’s about a man who made some mistakes and is facing the music. It’s also an exploration of how a man could so brazenly politicize the Department of Justice without really standing up for the reasons he went into politics in the first place.
-- The Wall Street Journal law blog
"I am a liberal, but this is not a partisan piece. This piece is not about Democrats or liberals, this piece is about a man who made mistakes and has to face the consequences of his mistakes."
-- Broad Street Review
Melissa Dunphy made her debut at the Lantern as Ophelia, and she performed marvelously. An emotional punching bag, Ophelia is used as bait and lost to madness herself; Dunphy did a beautiful job embodying what grief and emotional turmoil can do to an individual, her facial expressions speaking volumes.
-- Examiner
Laertes' sister, Ophelia, is portrayed with real passion by Melissa Dunphy, the striking actress who last year hit bull's-eyes in two young-lover roles at the Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre. She is unquestionably the city's leading Shakespeare ingenue.
-- Philadelphia Inquirer
Melissa Dunphy, a near-perfect Juliet, appears to be a rapturous teenager and transmits a wonderful impetuosity.
-- Broad Street Review
Uniquely in my experience, Melissa Dunphy made Pericles' kidnapped daughter Marina believable as a 14-year-old able to turn wickedness to virtue by example and exhortation - and fortuitously can actually play the violin well.
-- Gay City News (New York)
And without a similar global trade today—one that freely trades in products, art, and ideas—Philadelphians would not get to see the tender and nuanced performance of Australian native Melissa Dunphy in her local professional debut as Pericles’s daughter Marina.
-- Broad Street Review
[Melissa Dunphy's] acting is on a personal level with her audience. When delivering her monologues, Dunphy is able to draw the audience, as if she is speaking directly to them. Dunphy is outstanding in the role, conveying with both her voice and body language all the emotions felt by Juliet as she rebels against her father and falls in love with her enemy.
-- The Quad
She's Melissa Dunphy, and she's from Australia. She plays from the heart, and also delivers the cast's best line readings of Elizabethan English ...
-- Philadelphia Inquirer
Melissa Dunphy's setting of Luke Stromberg's Black Thunder reflects the extravagance and paranoia of young love and its powerful ending.
-- WRTI Critic-At-Large Podcast
In the second half, Luke Stromberg's marvelous poem "Black Thunder," about the aftereffects of drink, was given an appropriately bluesy haze by Melissa Dunphy.
-- Philadelphia Inquirer
As Ophelia, Melissa Dunphy flew around the set. Her mad scene and beautiful singing voice were mesmerizing. I loved the fluidity of her movement as she portrayed the Player Queen and Lucianus, and her transformations into Horatio and Guildenstern defied the elements of time.
-- Patriot-News
"The music is very jazzy, very sophisticated," said Melissa Dunphy, who is part of the cast besides serving as Gamut's music director. "It's very '30s and '40s."
-- Patriot-News
The fourth member of the key quartet is Melissa Dunphy, dark-haired, dark-eyed and full of anger. She plays the fiery Hotspur (Henry Percy) with an intensity and rage that make her a compelling figure to watch.
-- Patriot-News
"It's so different," Dunphy said. "You have to think yourself into a man's body. Since I'm five foot three and don't look anything like a man, it's hard to think myself into having broad shoulders and thinner hips."
-- Patriot-News
"Melissa is really talented, and she brings a lot of new talents to the company we've not had before."
-- Patriot-News
"I like Melissa's blog. It helps in my business to intimately know my employees."
-- Central Penn Business Journal
Ambient music played onstage by violinist Melissa Dunphy also helps to create a dreamlike atmosphere.
-- Patriot-News
Ariel, played by Melissa Dunphy, who slithers and slides on the stage and leaps and climbs all over it, seeks to be freed from Prospero's spell and serves as his eyes and ears. She also plays a recorder competently, adding to the production's eerie tone.
-- Patriot-News
Melissa Dunphy can relate to characters in an epic romance. She's living one herself, thanks to rock group Nine Inch Nails and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
-- Lancaster Intelligencer Journal
Even the background players in this production are noteworthy: the raucous fairies double as musicians and singers, playing rustic but graceful tunes by Melissa Dunphy
-- Patriot-News
Dunphy's Juliet is … a joy to watch … [her] face is captivating, whether in rapture or tears.
-- Lancaster Intelligencer Journal