Lighting Designer

Rodolfo is a struggling poet burning his manuscripts to keep out the winter chill. Mimi is a fellow tenant with big dreams and a deadly illness. A chance meeting has them falling in love, but when you’re at the bottom of Parisian society, every day could be your last. 

Puccini’s blockbuster opera returns to our stage starring Janai Brugger as the sweet but suffering Mimi and Oreste Cosimo as the lovestruck Rodolfo, with Gihoon Kim and Erica Petrocelli as the on-again-off-again lovers Marcello and Musetta.

Resident Conductor Lina González-Granados leads Puccini’s transcendent score, awash in lavish Romanticism and gorgeous melodies. Director Brenna Corner helms a timeless production from Herbert Ross that the LA Times calls a “warm, nostalgic evocation of Paris in Puccini’s time.”

La Bohème

The Music Center

Los Angeles-based composer, musician, and performance artist San Cha presents a new experimental opera. San Cha appears as Dolores, a beauty of humble means who, after marrying wealthy Salvador, is caught in a web of jealousy and abuse. Esperanza, a genderless being of light and empowerment, visits Dolores, giving her strength to realize her true value. Drawing on influences including Mexican immigrant family life, Catholic church choir, and Bay Area drag, this bold new work merges the dramatic, opulent operatic form with the melodrama of telenovelas. Compositions fusing ranchera, cumbia, punk, classical, and electro music are performed by a stellar cast led by Darian Donovan Thomas alongside stefa marin alarcon, Lu Coy, Kyle Kidd, Carolina Oliveros, and Phong Tran. With its title, Inebria Me references the intoxicating, transcendent, and sublime power of love that conquers all.

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Inebria Me

Walt Disney Concert Hall

Embark on a journey through the perils of excess in The Rake's Progress. This satire depicts the rise and fall of Tom Rakewell, a young man enticed by the promise of wealth and pleasure. Featuring some of the finest singing actors in opera, with Stravinsky’s genius score at the forefront, join us and find out whether Trulove conquers all.

The Rake's Progress

Orpheum Theater

Passion and politics collide in this star-studded production of Mozart’s rarely performed work. Against the backdrop of a raging war, the King of Pontus must put his family’s loyalty to the test. With a bristling score written by Mozart at the age of 14, Mitridate explores the tension of family ties amidst jealousy, aging, betrayal, and desire.

Mitridate, re di Ponto

Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre

Long Beach Opera presents an exploration into the work of visionary composer Pauline Oliveros, featuring the first-ever live staging of her operatic work Bye Bye Butterfly.

Bye Bye Butterfly

The Los Angeles Theatre Center

Writing is the preservation of identity in the new opera Omar from Grammy award-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens and composer Michael Abels. A true story of an indomitable faith enshrined in a two-hundred-year-old autobiography in an opera acclaimed by The New York Times as a “sweeping achievement.”
In the early 1800s, Islamic scholar Omar Ibn Said is forcibly taken from his village in West Africa and sold into slavery in Charleston, South Carolina. Attempting to flee, he is imprisoned in Fayetteville and taken to the plantation of another slaveholder, eager to convert him to Christianity. There Omar records his story in Arabic, transforming his world into an expansive canvas of text and faith, profoundly realized in Kaneza Schaal’s transcendent production.

Omar

War Memorial Opera House

From one of the storytellers behind the film Coco comes a modern take on Don Quixote bursting with imagination and Tejano music. The valiant knight—a.k.a. Jose Quijano—sets out to find his long-lost love.  But nothing is as it seems, he gets lost in his fantasies and the community wrestles with his dangerous reality.  This fast-paced, bilingual fable about the joys and perils of being the hero of your own story was proclaimed “revelatory” by the San Francisco Chronicle.  SCR is thrilled to welcome back Herbert Siguenza of Culture Clash to play Jose Quijano.

Quixote Nuevo

South Coast Repertory

It’s 1889 when Shane, a loner with a dark and mysterious past, rides into the heart of Wyoming’s cattle country. He’s instantly idolized by the young Bob Starrett, whose settler parents welcome Shane into their home and put him to work on their farm, where Shane discovers the family he never had. Meanwhile, hostility grows between the ruthless rancher Fletcher and the settlers starting their farms. When Fletcher plans to squeeze them out, Shane’s dangerous ways resurface as he fights to save the Starretts from ruin. This Guthrie commission by renowned playwright Karen Zacarías interrogates the assumptions and myths of the American West.

Shane

Guthrie Theater

In 1807, a 37-year-old scholar living in West Africa was captured and forced aboard a slave ship bound for Charleston, South Carolina. Omar Ibn Said's life and Muslim faith are remembered and retold in this inspirational West Coast premiere inspired by his remarkable 1831 autobiography (the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic).
Set in the shifting darkness of memory and imagination, Omar follows his compelling journey from a peaceful life in his homeland to enslavement in a violent, foreign world. Lost in the wilderness of his thoughts and his stolen life, he's haunted by memories of his family and the people he encounters along the way. Through it all, he somehow remains true to himself and his faith, against all odds. The luminous score—composed by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels—incorporates distinctive West African traditions with traditional opera instrumentation.
Tenor Jamez McCorkle makes his company debut in the title role, with bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch in a double role as two very different slave masters. Norman Garrett makes his company debut as Omar's brother, with Barry Banks as the auctioneer and Jacqueline Echols as Julie, an enslaved woman who gives Omar the key to a better life.

Los Angeles Music Center

Directed by LBO’s Artistic Director and visionary James Darrah, George Frideric Handel’s glorious music and surprisingly relevant drama re-emerges as a site specific, cinematically driven, wildy raucous contemporary party. A story of ill-fated romance, long lost familial relationships and conquerors and their captors, LBO’s GIUSTINO will elevate the ambiguities of gender already present in baroque opera and examine how stereotypes can be shattered even in the most traditional stories. Darrah’s breakthrough stylistic hybrid of cinema-theater recontextualizes the salon-like qualities of Handel’s 18th century work to a transitory, temporal space, further challenging the current norms of 21st century classical music consumption.

The libretto and score will be taken apart and reassembled by Darrah, conductor Christopher Rountree, and exciting young composer Shelley Washington, and will be performed with both authentic baroque specialists as well as contemporary musical and dramatic updates. The action of the scenes will move amongst the audience and to different parts of the location, and will be live-filmed to create a movie within an opera playing at all times. And just as spectators did during the time of Handel, the audience will be encouraged to truly revel in the decadence and transcendence of Handel’s glorious music without the trappings of traditional, staid classical music performances.

Lighting Designer

Pablo Santiago

Events

Past events

Nov 22 - Dec 14, 2025

La Bohème · LA Opera

16 - 18 Oct, 2025

Inebria Me · Redcat - Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater

About

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