Lovesick is a rock opera that fuses satire, desire, medicine, and myth into a theatrical fever dream about what we call “love” and how far we will go to keep it. The work follows Paul, a young poet desperate to win back his former girlfriend Dora, as he and his brother Austin seek out ever more extreme remedies for heartbreak. Their search leads them from contemporary urban life into a hallucinatory world of apothecaries, healers, hustlers, and pseudo-scientific cures, where emotional pain is treated like a diagnosable disease and longing becomes a marketplace.

As the story unfolds, Lovesick moves between comic absurdity and genuine emotional risk. A cast of vivid characters, including Dr. Diana Hart, the apothecary Jacques Ferrand, Julia, a blind guitarist named Joe, and a chorus of friends, turns the stage into a pressure chamber where reason, appetite, and fantasy collide. The score’s rock vocabulary drives that instability: intimate confessions can erupt into ensemble momentum in an instant, and irony can quickly give way to vulnerability. The music refuses a single emotional register, mirroring the volatility of obsession itself.

Beneath its wit and theatrical swagger, the piece asks serious questions: When does devotion become compulsion? Can love be healed, prescribed, or chemically induced? Is heartbreak an affliction to cure, or a condition to survive? By dramatizing these questions through both contemporary and historical lenses, Lovesick treats romance as both deeply personal and culturally constructed, exposing the thin line between tenderness and control, fantasy and self-deception.

Conceived as a genre-crossing stage work and premiered at National Sawdust, Lovesick embraces hybridity in form and tone. It is at once dark comedy, modern myth, and emotional anatomy. The result is a work that is musically kinetic, theatrically bold, and psychologically sharp: a rock opera about the seductions of certainty in matters of the heart, and the unruly, often uncurable human need beneath it.