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The California Report Magazine

A New Time-Traveling Rock Opera Celebrates Pasadena

The composer asked Pasadena residents what they'd tell residents from 1925 and 2125, then turned their answers into a time-traveling song cycle.
Steven Cuevas
Cellist Mika Larson (second from right) runs through the songs from the Pasadena Right Here, Right Now rock opera for the first time together with Street Symphony members Sarena Hsu, Xenia Deviatkina-Loh and Zach Dellinger. “It’s fun, but also there are moments that are poignant and kind of speak to the weight on everybody’s shoulders right now,” said drummer Alexander Eckhoff. “But like with a lot of the stuff that I’ve heard of [Mark’s] is always interesting, always slightly offbeat, but in a good way.” (Steven Cuevas for KQED)

With just days to go before their performance, a musical ensemble gathered in composer and singer-songwriter Russell Mark’s East Pasadena home for rehearsal.

The string quartet, which featured Mark’s wife, cellist Mika Larson, played in the dining room, while the other five musicians, twin guitars, piano, bass and drums crowded into the adjoining living room. The artists prepared for the June 6 debut of Pasadena Right Here, Right Now — a rock opera, inspired by Pasadena.

The musicians felt their way through the score, a biting fusion of buzzing, modern power pop melded with classical strings. The ensemble included members of the Street Symphony, a band of professional classical players led by a former Los Angeles Philharmonic violinist, that performs regular free concerts on L.A.’s Skid Row.

The story begins in Pasadena in the year 2125. A professor from the city’s renowned California Institute of Technology develops a time machine to travel back in time — to Pasadena in 2025.

Why travel back to 2025 from 100 years in the future? Well, this is where speculative science fiction takes over. Our time-traveling Caltech heroine wants to investigate what exactly sparked the deadly 2025 Eaton Fire. But her detective work leads to an unforeseen hiccup, typically found only in the pages of pulp sci-fi novels.

“The 2025 person and her companions feel like they need to show these people around and what’s happening at this chaotic time of political upheaval, natural disasters, [and show them] all of the amazing — and the equally scary — things happening in this world.”

Composer and singer-songwriter Russell Mark spent a year soliciting feedback from scores of Pasadena- and Altadena-area residents about the place where they live. Their detailed and, at times, emotional responses inform much of the opera’s lyrics and help guide the plot of the story. Mark kept stacks of responses around him at the studio while working on the music throughout the last year. (Steven Cuevas for KQED)

Time travel aside, Pasadena Right Here, Right Now ultimately becomes a vehicle to explore the Pasadena and Altadena area of today, a way for our present selves to explain these times to someone a hundred years in the past, and a hundred years in the future. (Spoiler alert: It’s the time machine that sparked the fire.)

“You can’t take that stuff too seriously, the time travel stuff, you just need to let it go,” he said, laughing. “You just have to accept it! But the backbone is this coming together of the past and the future, here in the present.”

To create the lyrics, Mark spent the better part of the past year soliciting feedback from dozens of Pasadena and Altadena residents, in person and online, via a survey that asked a series of probing questions about their lives in what lots of locals affectionately call the ‘Dena.

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“I’m calling this project a ‘musical time capsule,’” Mark said. “I’m asking people what they think people from 1925 will be surprised about. And what would you want people to know about you in 2125 that you think might end up distorted or mistranslated somehow?”

A song called “Time Capsule” playfully namechecks a lot of the local ‘Dena treasures that survey respondents say they’d be proud to share with a resident from 1925 or 2125. This includes local gems like the sci-fi novels of longtime Altadena resident Octavia Butler, cassette tapes from Pasadena’s own hard rock heroes Van Halen, flocks of wild parrots and the feral peacocks of East Pasadena.

“I made it a point to talk about this moment in 2025 and elaborate on the things that I have available to me, but also what is slightly out of my reach in the hybrid ways that we live,” said local writer Natalie Lydick, who responded to Mark’s survey questions.

Lydick said she wanted to remind anyone from Pasadena’s past or future that not everything modernizes as radically or as rapidly as we might think.

“I said, I have a cell phone and a computer, and I’m digitally literate, but I also have two full bookshelves, and I love to read print media,” Lydick said. “Electrical vehicles are widely available, but most people, including me, still drive gas-powered cars. Hindsight creates this idea of progress, [but] time moves so much slower than we think.”

That idea made its way into the lyrics of a song called “We Tried with the House,” in which one of the characters is explaining the Pasadena of today to one of the story’s time travelers.

Russell Mark sits in his recording studio to play some rough demos from his new project Pasadena Right Here, Right Now, an ambitious, bitter-sweet rock opera involving a time-traveling Caltech professor, the Eaton Fire and the thoughts of contemporary Pasadena-Altadena area residents. (Steven Cuevas for KQED)

“And I hope you recognize the place, I hope it seems familiar / We still got cars and planes and trains / And even horses up in Altadena / We got books and vinyl records on our shelves / And we care for neighbors like we care for ourselves.”

Guitarist and backup singer Myron Kaplan recalled how she answered a survey question that asked, what would you want to put in a physical time capsule representing this community?

“A snow globe with embers from a house burning down instead of snowflakes,” Kaplan said, making a direct reference to the Eaton Fire, which killed 19 people and destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses in Altadena, North Pasadena and Sierra Madre.

“I mean, it was a rough year, man, anyone who lives here can tell you that,” said Kaplan, recalling how she temporarily relocated to Las Vegas for several weeks after the fire to escape the poor air quality and process the shock and trauma of the disaster.

Mark had no clue how the plot would unfold when he embarked on the project. But he said the survey responses that informed much of the project’s lyrics were remarkably consistent.

Cellist Mika Larson (center left), and composer Russell Mark (seated) with members of the Pasadena Right Here, Right Now ensemble, including Street Symphony founder Vijay Gupta (fourth from left) and Symphony board chair Georgia Hawley (right), after a live preview of the rock opera at the Midnight Mission’s weekly live music series in L.A.’s Skid Row neighborhood. (Steven Cuevas for KQED)

“People love the town, they love the beauty of the town, the trees, the architecture, the mountains, the friendliness, the number of cultural institutions,” Mark said. “The answers weren’t very different at all.”

“It makes you feel you live somewhere significant / So listen when they tell you / We’re living in the center of the universe! Pasadena is the center of the universe,” booms the anthemic pop rock chorus in “Center of the Universe,” a centerpiece of the show that reflects the affection and local pride that so many share for the Pasadena area.

“It’s easy to forget that it doesn’t matter whether you live in a mansion or you live on the street, you’re still a member of this community,” Mark said.

Hear songs from Pasadena Right Here, Right Now, on Mark’s website.

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