His most recent productions have been for the Dublin based Early Music performance ensemble eX for which he serves as Artistic Director. With eX he has directed Christ Lag in Todes Banden (2007), an hallucinatory staging of Bach’s first cantata and the sources that inspired it and Ex Tenebris (2006), a dance theatre piece set to Christmas music of the middle ages and the renaissance.

He studied music composition and philosophy at Bard College and the University of the Pacific and holds an MBA from Columbia University.

Mr. Fraad was awarded two consecutive grants from the National Opera Institute (National Endowment for the Arts) for Stage Direction and spent two years at the English National Opera assisting the Director of Productions, Colin Graham as well as working at Opéra National de Belgique, the Old Vic and Opera North (Leeds).
    
In the United States he has worked on the staff of San Francisco Opera, San Diego Opera, Central City Opera and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.

Productions of Puccini’s Tosca at Los Angeles Opera and Verdi’s Rigoletto at Pennsylvania Opera Theatre received major international attention and established his reputation as a director intent on experimenting with form and devising radical new interpretations of the classics.

In 1984 he founded Opera at the Academy at the New York Academy of Art in New York. Together with Associate Director Christopher Alden and his brother David, Mr. Fraad built what was to become the most experimental, exciting and critically acclaimed opera organization in New York of the 1980’s and early 1990’s. During these years he was a protégé of the great American impresario Joseph Papp, directing and producing numerous operas in association with The New York Shakespeare Festival (The Public Theater). Andy Warhol filmed his production of The Magic Flute and subsequently broadcast it on MTV. Along with producing full-scale operas, Opera at the Academy featured a year round training institute whose faculty included luminaries from the worlds of opera and theatre.

In 1993 he joined with Producer Paula Heil Fisher to form a new company, Millennial Arts Productions for which he was Artistic Director. Millennial Arts located at the City Center theatre in New York, was founded to create spectacle that reflected the emerging trends that were transforming society at the turn of the millennium. The company produced works for Broadway, off Broadway, film and productions that created a new synthesis between drama, dance, music and opera. These meta-musical theatre productions have become his signature works. His staging of Handel’s Messiah with costumes by Hussein Chalayan created a stir in New York and at the Utrecht Early Music Festival (2000). Esther  (1998) praised by New York Magazine as, “a miraculous marriage of Handel and Racine” featured the debut of counter tenor Bejun Mehta.

Other creations all performed in New York include, The Rape of the Lock (1999), Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater (1999) and Carissimi’s Jeptha (1998) both with Derek Lee Ragin, Stravinsky’s Pulcinella (1997), Bach’s cantata, Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott (1996), and The Rubbayat of Omar Khayyam (1995).

Between 2001 and 2004 Mr. Fraad served as Director of The Ark in Dublin, Europe’s only major cultural centre for young audiences and families. His cutting edge theatre productions for The Ark toured the country and won several awards and nominations including one for Best Production at the ESB Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards for his staging of Jocelyn Clarke’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKeane’s graphic novella The Day I Swapped My Dad for 2 Goldfish. At The Ark he commissioned and directed several new works for the stage including plays with Booker Prize winners John Banville and Roddy Doyle.
    
Between 2004 and 2006 he lived in Paris and New York and resumed working with Millennial Arts Productions. He was Artistic Advisor for the company’s full-length documentary Finding Eleazar as well as playing a contentious video director in the film. Finding Eleazar was an official selection at the Tribeca, Savannah, Montreal and Haifa Film Festivals and was released theatrically in New York.

He is presently preparing a new production for eX, Three Lessons on Darkness, a work inspired by the music of François Couperin.

The house was packed and the crowd was ecstatic.
The analogy between the kingdom of peace and harmony as predicted in the bible and the mental stability as a result of the healing of a psychiatric patient was powerful!

ESTHER (Millennial Arts Productions, Angel Orensanz Foundation, New York, NY)
The midwives who made it possible are director Eric Fraad, a Joseph Papp protégé, and Bradley Brookshire a leading light of New York’s original-instrument scene… Esther is a miraculous merging of Handel and Racine.
Don’t ask me how, but the whole crazy thing works….
Faint-hearted performers would be disastrous in this mannerist exercise, but the cast, responding to Fraad’s urgent direction, went right to the core of their characters while communicating the tragic kernel of the story.

Director Eric Fraad is so in love with historical research that he made it the basis of his Esther, which intertwined Handel’s first oratorio with Racine’s great drama.
In one of the most effective scenes, the mordantly pious Mordecai (sung by countertenor Bejun Mehta) invokes Jehovah in a passionate plea. To illustrate God’s presence at that moment, the altar suddenly lit up with blinding brilliance, its architectural features (Star of David, Torah ark, etc.) outlined with bulbs normally found on Hollywood stars’ dressing-room mirrors — a great coup de théâtre.

With the text and the music cut and re-organized by Mr. Fraad…the two hour performance is not at all unwieldy, but rather an engaging leap into a baroque telling of the story from the book of Esther.
Most intriguing was the way different forms of expression combined to convey the story. Handel gives its basics: Haman, lieutenant of King Ahaseurus of Persia, has persuaded the king to have all the Jews murdered; Mordecai persuades his “daughter” Esther, the queen, to go un-summoned to her husband and beg for the life of her people. Mr. Fraad wisely included both versions of Esther’s reaction to Mordecai’s charge. Flo Cabre-Andrews, the French-born actress playing Esther, explosively delivered Racine’s prayer for divine aid in the original French; when soprano Indira Mahajan got her chance, with Handel’s “Tears assist me” her
operatic delivery presented a more mature, but equally concentrated moment of emotion within the same stylized framework of declamation. I wouldn’t have missed either.

DUBLIN 1742 (The Ark, Dublin)
Director Eric Fraad, better known for innovative work in opera and music theatre, particularly as a founder of Opera at the Academy in New York in the 1980’s. He begins his production of Dublin 1742, not on the stage, but in one of the upper floor workshop rooms of The Ark. Here we encounter each character from the play, individually, alone in a small, box-like cubicle, oblivious to the gawking crowds and locked obsessively, repetitively, in some deeply personal gestic movement detached from any narrative context.
Watching characters as pure spectacle is unsettling. Indeed, one of this production’s most memorable images is of Jonathan Swift stumbling around in his word-daubed cell in the final stages of dementia, looking endlessly at the lost page of a manuscript.
In a sense, Dublin 1742 as a whole was a deconstruction of theatrical form. It began with pure spectacle; it became pure exposition in its second movement; then, having dispatched the business of exposition, re-integrated image and narrative.
I expect that the impact of Dublin 1742 was less from its accomplished pastiche or its mediations on the artist in society than from the energy of its formal explorations. It is clear from this production that Fraad is interested in theatrical form per se, in a manner that augurs well for the future of The Ark.

It is produced to the highest standards of acting, direction, costumes, set design and other stage values. Always a delight to the eye and ear, it spares no effort to recreate period details, a meticulous exercise in revisiting the past.

Ambitious, intelligent and immediate, The Ark’s new production is an exhibition/performance offering a fascinating glimpse of Georgian Dublin through the eyes of social-climbing actress and memoirist of the time. Cleverly site-specific and historically informed, John Banville’s play blows the cobwebs from the cultural outpost of the empire to reveal George Handel ironing out the kinks in his oratorio, Messiah while Jonathan Swift suffers bouts of hallucination and dementia in the Deanery of St Patrick’s.