ST. LOUIS OPERA NEWS COVERAGE

Union Avenue Opera has announced its 2026 Festival Season in St. Louis. The lineup includes Fiddler on the Roof, L’elisir d’amore, and Samson et Dalila. Performances run July through August....

Opera is widely considered to be a seasonal flower.  Around the world opera festivals show their shoots in early spring, they blossom in the summer, and they stretch their glory into the fall.  In St. Louis, though, we find one of the few fine opera companies willing to brave the icy blasts of win...

Kelly Slawson brings a dazzlingly powerful, beautiful voice to the title role.   It’s an unforgettable triumph in a real tour de force....

Union Avenue Opera will present its inaugural One-Act Festival October 10–12, 2025, featuring dwb (driving while black) and As One. Both contemporary works explore themes of identity, injustice, and transformation, followed by audience talk-backs with artists and guests....

A powerful double-bill. 'Josephine' is a stunning mini-biography of a great star; 'Pagliacci' is an overpoweringly passionate step into verismo opera....

Opera Theatre of St. Louis draws us into a truly enchanted forest.  In staging Benjamin Britten’s 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream' they create a marvelous amalgam of strange and gorgeous music, superlative voices, and design and directorial genius.  And they are unerringly true to Shakespeare’s i...

Susanne Burgess sings Norina, the quintessential bel canto soprano role. She’s astonishing! She defines that vocal style....

'This House', a world premiere opera at Opera Theatre of St. Louis is the saga of a Harlem family that is both blest and cursed....

For nearly half a century the Opera Theatre of St. Louis has been bringing quite glorious opera to our fair city.  It just opened its semicentennial season with a brilliant and lively production of Die Fledermaus, by Johann Strauss II. ...

Acclaimed baritone Justin Austin will return to Opera Theatre of Saint Louis for the world premiere of Ricky Ian Gordon’s This House from May 31 to June 29, 2025....

Winter Opera rounds out its 18th season with a splendid production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). This is perhaps the most popular opera in the world, and it is an all-round challenge for any company—vocally and technically....

Opera Theatre of Saint Louis has a rich history in world premiers, often commissioning new works from  significant composers and librettists.  But it seeks to foster brand new talents too. Its New Works Collective is a three-year project wherein each year OTSL commits to developing and producing t...

Elephants? No elephants here. Just grand, grand opera! (Tenor Limmie Pulliam will astonish you!) The evening is filled with moments of glory....

Saint Louis’ Union Avenue Opera is celebrating the start of it’s thirtieth year with a superb production of Bizet’s Carmen!  (Thirty years—that’s twenty-nine seasons.  Like everyone else Union Avenue was “dark” in 2020.)  Thirty years of ever-increasing excellence in this most chall...

Opera Theatre of Saint Louis has opened an utterly glorious production of his opera, Galileo Galilei. It reconfirms OTSL’s place among the finest opera companies in the world. And it will assuredly help you resolve your issues with Phillip Glass....

Handel's 'Julius Caesar' opens at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis....

Get a first look at Opera Theatre of St. Louis' production of La Bohéme, now on stage through June 30th 2024. Check out the cast in action in this all-new video....

Opera Theatre of Saint Louis (OTSL) announced repertory and celebrations for a landmark 50th season in 2025, celebrating five decades of artistic innovation and discovery since the company’s founding in 1976. The 2025 Festival Season opens on May 24, 2025, with Johann Strauss II’s effervescent...

You'll fall in love with Puccini yet again. Opera Theatre of St. Louis continues their forty-ninth season with a superb production of Puccini’s masterpiece, La Bohème—his most beloved work.  The occasional sprinkle of very light rain seemed to refresh rather than deter those dining on the love...

Spring fever?  If you’ve been made a bit dozy by these warm spring days the new production at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis will, with a bang, hoist you wide awake in all your senses.  Rossini’s The Barber of Seville opened Saturday to an audience that packed the Loretto-Hilton theatre to the r...

Winter Opera continues it’s seventeenth season with another iconic operetta—Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta.  This lovely old show premiered in 1910. It was produced by the first Oscar Hammerstein (the grandfather of you-know-who).  In 1935 a movie version was made—with Jeanette MacDonal...

Watch this all-new workshop clip from On My Mind, one of the three short operas premiering as a part of the 2024 New Works Collective! The collective runs from March 14th through 16th, 2024. Check out the video!...

Gina Galati’s wonderful Winter Opera company continues its 17th season with Puccini’s Manon Lescaut.  This work, which opened in 1893, was Puccini’s first great hit.  It was rather daring of Puccini to present this piece, based as it was on a novel that had already been adapted to op...

The wonderful Winter Opera has opened a quite splendid production of what has been called “the opera of all operas”—Mozart’s amazing Don Giovanni....

When the musical Ragtime was produced for Broadway in 1998 it was a colossal, big-budget show.  It cost some ten million dollars.  What in the world were the folks at tiny little Union Avenue Opera thinking when they decided to include this show in their twenty-ninth season?  Ragtime, the musical...

Scott Schoonover and his Union Avenue Opera have a long history (now twenty-nine years) of gathering remarkable operatic voices.  Their current production of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale has voices that are astonishingly beautiful!  It’s a work you should not miss!  Two brilliant young stars—Ch...

“The Turn of the Screw,” a deft psychological exploration of the dimensions of horror and the human mind. UAO’s successful staging of the work appropriately raised more questions than it answered, about danger, fear, the limits of human perception, and a host of other commonplaces in horror....

It is a brilliant production of the second-most produced American opera. (After 'Porgy and Bess') Gorgeous scenic effects and world-class voices....

Sublime voices overcome a troubled concept....

Last Saturday Opera Theatre of St. Louis premiered a new adaptation of Scott Joplin’s legendary opera Treemonisha.  It is a bright and worthy addition to our recent flurry of adoration of some of America’s major black composers;  the Black Rep closed their stunningly fine evening of Eubie Blak...

A stellar cast brightens a Romberg favorite. Operetta, as a genre, arose in the 1850's and swelled into a widely beloved form of entertainment. In America its chief luminaries were Sigmund Romberg, Victor Herbert, and Rudolf Friml. From the 1920's to the '40's the modern musical gradually drove oper...

Winter Opera has presented a truly gorgeous production of Puccini's La Rondine (The Swallow). Puccini is the supreme master of romantic melody, and in Rondine he outdoes himself. I love this opera, my heart having been beguiled early by one lilting, gently syncopated romantic waltz refrain that recu...

Verdi's Falstaff is another glittering gem in the train of Union Avenue Opera. I'm not a big fan of 're-purposing' classic plays. Poor Shakespeare! He's been subjected to such vandalism over the years with modern 'concept' versions of his works. No, I do not want to go to see a trendy lesbian-Hamlet...

Glorious voices fill Tchaikovsky's masterpiece with beauty. After the tribulations of the pandemic the Union Avenue Opera returns to its lovely home. Here, in the nave of the Union Avenue Christian Church, the company presents first-class opera up-close and intimate. They open their 28th season with...

What did our critic think? Center Stage is a great smörgåsbord of opera- No, no, that's far too Swedish and Lutheran and heavy. If the whole OTSL festival is a great feast, then Center Stage is the delicious icing on the top of that final cake. It's all dessert and no vegetables....

This summer, Union Avenue Opera will make its highly anticipated return to its home stage within the historic Union Avenue Christian Church. Union Avenue Opera will offer a three-opera festival season opening with Tchaikovsky's masterpiece, Eugene Onegin (July 8, 9, 15, 16) which last appeared on th...

A marvelously theatrical, dream-haunted evening tells of gay-rights activist Harvey Milk’s life and death....

Dr. Oliver Sacks' best seller becomes a fascinating opera with its world premiere at Opera Theatre Saint Louis. Read the review!...

The marvelous Opera Theatre of Saint Louis continues its festival season with perhaps the most popular opera in the world—Mozart’s glorious The Magic Flute! Read our BWW critic's review....

Opera Theatre Saint Louis opens its 47th season with a splendid 'Carmen'. Read our BWW critic's review....