Lysistrata, or The Nude Goddess

In 2005, composer-librettist Mark Adamo—fresh off his first opera, Little Women—freely adapted, for his second, Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, the comedy about the women of Athens and Sparta who, disgusted by a pointless war, barricade themselves in the Athenian treasury and swear a sanction on sex until their men make peace. “Freely” is the key word here: the composer “…cut all but three scenes of the play, created new male characters, changed the w...