In Great Scott, the Kansas-born mezzo-soprano, one of today's best-loved classical singers, creates a role conceived specifically with her in mind. The character she
plays, Arden Scott, just happens to be an opera star, and she is the lynchpin of what Fred Plotkin of WQXR, the USA's leading classical music radio station, welcomed as
a "deeply moving and musically brilliant work" that "should enter the standard repertory just as Heggie's two previous masterpieces - Dead Man Walking and Moby-Dick - already have". Jake Heggie, who has been described as US opera's most successful composer, chose the celebrated playwright Terence McNally as his librettist for Great Scott.