KQED61%
A New Time-Traveling Rock Opera Celebrates Pasadena 14%
By Steven Cuevas0%
7/3/2026, 9:00:39 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 22 faulty reasoning types, including Unattributed Quote, Halo Effect, and Hasty Generalization, with In-Group Bias as the most egregious example at 16.8% saturation with 172 hits. Analysis detected 1,146 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,026 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 30.2% and a BS Rank of 14% (18,965 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 86.60% of the article peer group.
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.”
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.
“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.
“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.
“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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3speakers38%attributed speech637writer words
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75%flagged-word coverageMyron Kaplan
117 attributed words30% of attributed speech61% writer coverage
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