News & Press

In Review: ONE Festival Omaha, Nebraska March 30-April 14, 2019 Words: Xenia Hanusiak Opera Omaha’s ONE Festival, co-directed by the company’s general director, Roger Weitz, and director James Darrah, is a multidisciplinary two-week series that presents opera, installation, dance, exhibitions, and social gatherings designed to embrace Omaha’s creative community. The multi-venue festival also offers a generously supported platform for the next generation of creators, reflecting the company’s notable commitment to the breadth of operatic representation and audience growth. The festival is impressively international in scope, with creators and performers represented from across the globe, and extraordinarily well resourced. In this second iteration, two new productions occupied the central focus. A...

Ellen Reid Wins Pulitzer for Prism: Composer's Generosity of Spirit and Notes By: Susan Hall - Apr 16, 2019 Ellen Reid has been a hot item this year. Four venues in Los Angeles commissioned work from her. Now Prism, a Beth Morrison production, has won the Pulitzer prize for music. We wandered her soundscape in Omaha created for her by Opera Omaha at the Josyln Art Museum. There is a composer Ellen Reid and a sound artist Ellen Reid. Both can be wonderfully present in her work. She writes notes as a composer would, but her notion of a soundscape has to do with how a listener received the sounds. She is ...

Review: Opera Omaha gives restored version of 'Faust' a heavenly debut By Drew Neneman / World-Herald correspondent Apr 13, 2019 As old as the epic Greek poet Virgil is the observation that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” At the Orpheum Theater on Friday night, Opera Omaha turned this ancient bit of wisdom into an incredible double-entendre. With Steven White conducting the Omaha Symphony, an Opera Omaha production of Charles Gounod’s “Faust” played with the value of intention from a composer’s point of view, a hero’s point of view, a villain’s point of view and a patron’s point of view in an exhilarating production. This was the world prem...

Award Winning Theater Director Debuts with Opera Omaha this Weekend by Sarah Hookey Apr. 11, 2019 There's only one transformative, artist-packed weekend left of Opera Omaha's ONE Festival, to include the Opera Omaha debut of acclaimed theatre director Lileana Blain-Cruz as she directs the world stage premiere of a new performance edition of Gounod's Faust. A recent recipient of a 2018 United States Artists Award, grantee of a Knight Foundation award and past recipient of an Obie Award, Blain-Cruz is breathing vibrant energy into this updated production of Faust, a fascinating rendition that reimagines the classic, hedonistic tale. Additionally, Conductor Steven White (Così fan tutte, 2017) returns to Opera Omaha to lead the Omaha S...

Words To Music: Young Poets And Composers Collaborate For Unique Opera by Jack Williams- NET News April 5, 2019 A collaboration that combines young poets and opera will showcase a project that’s teaching fledgling writers how their words can be made into music. Opera Omaha’s Poetry and Music concert takes place on Sunday at Kaneko in Omaha. Soft-spoken and wearing a Metallica t-shirt, it may not seem like Zach Evans,12, belongs at Opera Omaha’s offices, where trained professionals rehearse a new piece in the next room. But in this case, he does. “I like a lot of music, from heavy metal to smooth jazz,” Evans said. He’s one of seven Neb...

Les Enfants Terribles OMAHA Opera Omaha 4/3/19 ON APRIL 3, Opera Omaha offered a stunning evening of music, dance and theater with Philip Glass’s chamber opera Les Enfants Terribles, the first of the company’s two 2019 ONE Festival operas. A large open area of the Mastercraft Building at Millwork Commons, an old mattress factory now repurposed as an office space, was filled with risers for the audience and a large staging area, designed by Yuki Izumihara. The square stage was painted white, and the main playing area was surrounded by a trench filled with white plastic objects. The space was the perfect setting for James Darrah’s powerful, evocative and physically demand...