Fever Pitch, the book was rightly acclaimed as a brilliant sport book when published in 1992 and all football fans will understand and the identify with the obsession, passion, commitment and despair that football fans feel for their club . The book covers a period from 1968 to 1992 using 75 matches (mainly Arsenal games) to link to author Nick Hornby's life peaking with May 1989, when Arsenal won the league for the first time in 18 years and made him, a born again member of the church of latter day championship believer. So the challenge was how to compress this into a coherent opera set in a Church?
Composer, Scott Stroman , artistic director of Highbury Opera Theatre, and librettist Tamsin Collison took on the challenge and added the constraints that shaped the production. The venue, the Union Chapel in Highbury is a grand Victorian church with wooden pews and a temporary stage around the large pulpit and is home of HOT. The enthusiastic twenty seven local community adult choir and two children's chorus of twenty are integral to the production. The structure of two forty five minute halves under the huge Highbury clock that marks out the passing of time. Then edited the selection of matches down to a handful of key ones - Gooners first game (in 68) , league cup defeat (in 69), the double winning team ( of 71) , a local derby ( in 81) and the league winning game (in 89).
