The Tin Angel—libretto by the late Paul Pines after his perhaps partially autobiographical detective thriller, music by Daniel Asia—sounds like the kind of new opera that would tax the resources of the Metropolitan. After a 15-year gestation, it has landed instead in the care of New York’s Teatro Grattacielo, a company best known for heroic shoestring revivals of verismo white elephants. On with your opera cape, and off with you to the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, 74 East Fourth Street, Off Off Broadway’s answer to Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the pre-Trump Kennedy Center. The action of The Tin Angel unfolds in a Federal-era three-story but a stone’s throw away from La MaMa, at the legendary jazz mecca The Tin Palace, founded by Pines in 1973 in a space that once housed a speakeasy (stroll over to 325 Bowery to read the laminated commemorative marker). And there, we’re told, “a unique cast of characters play out their dramatic story as a call for redemption.” The cast includes a whopping 17 principals. Asia’s score, infused with echoes of popular American folk songs and jazz, pays tribute to forerunners Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, and Carlisle Floyd. Apart from the fact of La MaMa’s proximity to the long-vanished Tin Palace, it seems uniquely fitting that The Tin Angel should unfurl its wings where the indomitable Black Chicago native Ellen Stewart (1919–2011) built her empire. A dressmaker by trade, she founded La MaMa in 1961 on pure instinct and intuition, morphing into Queen Bee of the international avant-garde back when such a thing existed. —Matthew Gurewitsch