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He’s a ‘slave 4 U’

By Adam Rathe
The Brooklyn Paper

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Straight from her latest barely clothed fiasco, Britney Spears is coming to New York. On Sunday, March 16, “TimberBrit,” an opera telling the (as yet) fictional story of the rekindled love between Spears and her former beau Justin Timberlake, will receive its world premiere.

To create the songs, composer Jacob Cooper listened to hits from Spears’s oeuvre at a very slow speed, eliminating the hooks from the slickly produced tracks, and wrote his own songs inspired by the experience. To make his dream a reality, Cooper drafted Williamsburg resident Yuka Igarashi as his librettist and Park Sloper J.J. Lind as his director.

“We started to think about what Britney meant in popular culture,” said Igarashi, “and the idea that she’s a huge, melodramatic figure made us want to re-imagine the way people thought about her.”

And after all of this careful study, did Igarashi have any advice for the troubled pop tart turned “momstrosity”?

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“We aren’t thinking of her as anything but a fictional character, so it’s hard to make any comments about who she is,” said Igarashi, who teaches writing at Columbia. “But it did give me an excuse to read TMZ.”

“TimberBrit” will be performed at 7:30 pm and 9 pm on March 16 at The Tank (279 Church St. in Manhattan). Tickets are $10. For information, visit www.myspace.com/timberbrit.

©2008 The Brooklyn Paper

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