Fresh Notes: Grassroots Opera Companies Take Off in Houston

It should surprise no one that in Houston, the fourth largest city in the country, the art of opera is thriving on the Wortham Theater Center stage downtown as well as in urban breweries and suburban performing arts spaces. The New York Times shined a spotlight on the Houston Grand Opera (HGO) recently, lauding its creative leadership and calling it “a beacon of innovation.” While HGO leads the city’s opera scene as the standard-bearer of artistic excellence with its long legacy of creating world class opera at the highest level, Houston is also lucky to have Opera in the Heights producing opera at cozy Lambert Hall since 1996. What keeps the opera scene buzzing is also a growing number of smaller grassroots companies that are filling in the gaps and bringing their own unique brand of opera to diverse audiences.

One such company is Hopera, founded over a few pints of beer in 2023 by a group of friends who had the ingenious idea of putting on casual opera performances at local craft breweries. “I think the idea is novel enough but not so novel that people don’t know what it is,” says Megan Berti, Hopera Artistic Director and Co-founder. “They can’t completely get their heads around it but it’s exciting and different.” What makes beer and opera go together might just be the juxtaposition. “Everyone thinks opera is snooty: gilded age, gloves, and opera glasses, and here we are singing at a brewery that sometimes doesn’t even have air conditioning,” adds Brennan Blankenship, Hopera Executive Director and Co-founder. “It’s the contrast between this opulent, decadent thing that people think opera is and the casualness of the people coming to breweries. Specifically in Houston breweries have become such a big part of the culture. It makes sense for this to be the place to tap into folks in the community.”

The three leading ladies of Hopera, Berti, Blankenship, and Ashley Duplechien, Director of Marketing and Development, met while singing in the HGO Chorus. When COVID shut everything down in 2020, they did not perform at all for a very long time. “I was itching to get back into what I love,” remembers Berti. “Being in the chorus is great in many ways but it’s not the same kind of creative outlet as when you create something yourself.” Berti has a bartending background. It pays the bills when performing contracts run dry. The bar where she worked featured mostly punk rock bands, so she joked with her boss that he had a professional opera singer in his employ yet he had never asked her to perform. A challenge was put down and the seed of an idea that became Hopera was planted. “The brewing community in Houston is very tight,” explains Berti. “I met a lot of brewers through working and I wanted to support local establishments.” “It’s a symbiotic, reciprocal relationship,” adds Blankenship. “We get the venue and bartending for free and they sell a lot of drinks. We are focusing on local by creating these relationships with as many partners as possible, between breweries and artists.”

This season, Hopera has a full line-up of events for its fans that includes two fully staged operas, Pagliacci in the fall (Nov. 21 and Nov. 24, 2025) and “Cozy” (Cosi fan tutte) in the spring (May 14 and May 16, 2026), at Equal Parts Brewing and Eureka Heights Brew Co. These classics, cleverly reimagined and rewritten by Berti and Duplechien, are sung in English. The broad strokes are the same but the details may change. “People have come here to be entertained. We want to make opera accessible in language, in casualness, and in relatability,” explains Blankenship. “That is why updating it is something that seems logical to us. We are not dumbing it down. We are reframing it and modernizing it.” She believes opera is not too precious to cut up. “Hopera offers a different kind of experience but it is still opera,” continues Blankenship. “We have complete newbies saying this is so much fun, industry professionals who come to let loose and just enjoy themselves, and hard core opera fans who are saying this is it. This is how to transform opera.”

Audience engagement and participation is a focal point for Hopera. Free Pint-Sized Performances and Opera Karaoke events are sprinkled throughout the season. “People are incredibly close and we interact with them,” says Blankenship. “We are hoping to be that kind of gateway into classical music that can be seen, can be felt, and can be just as emotionally riveting as the latest movie on Netflix. You can really feel the thrill of the operatic voice in a brewery.” For Karaoke nights, everyone in the audience is invited to sing their music of choice, alongside professional opera singers. “Nessun dorma” can easily be followed by “Hotel California,” or a favorite Broadway tune.

Berti thinks there is space for “tons of classical music” in Houston. Hopera is growing and spreading the gospel of “opera for everyone” in unlikely places, from the community watering hole, to local grocery stores for Oktoberfest and Christmas caroling, to the immersive art space Meow Wolf, where they will be appearing as a part of its newly launched “Phenomenomaly” performance series.

One of the drivers for the growth of Hopera is the deep talent pool of singers in Houston. “We are really keyed into the local music scene and we know there are a lot of great singers here who are under-utilized, who never get the spotlight they should be getting,” says Berti. “Being able to give that to them is really cool.”

Grassroots opera companies sprout up because singers want to start something on their own to exercise their agency and creativity outside of work in the big companies. This is true for Hopera and also for Lone Star Lyric Founder and Director Kelli Estes. “The idea of giving somebody else the power over when I get to perform got a little bit ludicrous to me,” recalls Estes. She was living in New York City at the time and got tired of auditioning and waiting around for phone calls. “So I thought work begets work, so produce your own and just keep doing it, and the more you do the more you DO!” Now in its 20th season, Lone Star Lyric has established itself as a hub of lyric theater, producing one major show each summer as well as jazz and cabaret performances throughout the year.

Estes believes there is nothing more universal and intimate than the human voice. “We all share the voice, and to sit close to somebody who all of a sudden breaks into song, that’s so thrilling and exciting.” Opera, musical theater, jazz, cabaret–it’s all lyric theater. Estes is always trying to cross pollinate them and draw the audience in to experience something unexpected. The focus is on the singers and the way they deliver the narrative. “It’s about reimagining and spinning a story,” says Estes. “I’m not interested in the bells and whistles and the revolving two-story sets. Without all the trappings you can focus in on the actual story and the emotions.”

Over the years Lone Star Lyric has produced many memorable, original shows, including commissions and premieres of new works. There was a celebration of operettas called Die Operette mit Schlag (Operetta with Cream), the Cantata Cafe, where audience members were seated at tables and served by the singers, the interactive production Simply Grimm featuring five newly commissioned one-act operas based on Grimm’s fairy tales, and Omari Tau’s jazz opera A Night at the Algoquinn. The most recent show is always the most fun for Estes. Last summer Lone Star Lyric drew star power to Houston with its production of Stephen Schwartz’s only opera, Séance on a Wet Afternoon. Schwartz, a legendary American musical theater composer and lyricist with multiple Grammy and Academy Awards (Wicked, Godspell, Pocahontas), was thrilled by the production.

Like Berti, Estes believes Houston has a big appetite for theater and the performing arts. “I call us the plankton company,” says Estes. “Just because we are a small organization doesn’t mean we are small in quality or artistic creativity. It’s just scale. We are bringing the story to you up close and personal.” Estes is committed to hiring local singers. “Houston is packed with unbelievable international level talent and I am passionate about hiring local and giving opportunities to emerging talent.” She has had Met singers who happened to live here share the stage with high school talent. One of those high schoolers is now singing a major role in a Broadway musical.

The mission to provide local singers with performance experience and additional income is what drove tenor Brian Yeakley to create Operativo, an opera company that focuses on serving the artists. Operativo curates quality chamber-sized performances where audiences can connect with the artists. “I was thinking of the word ‘operative’ to describe how opera careers work, how all the cogs in a machine have to work together to make it go,” says Yeakley, Operativo Founder and Executive Director. “As professional singers we have all had at least one traumatic event at some gig because of how we are expected to be. I want to give artists living in Houston a good working experience and another performance opportunity ‘safety net’ to come back to any time they have a dry singing season.” Operativo offers a general season and a mentoring program. Each show is double cast, with a fully professional cast and an amateur cast from the mentoring program. There is genuine care that begins with the auditioning process. Singers are not just asked to sing but also to share their goals. Yeakley likes to ask if they are career bound or singing purely for enjoyment, or if they are working on specific things with their vocal teachers that the director should then keep an eye on for the show. The shows themselves are homey and intimate, a positive experience for both performers and the audience.

Soprano Errin Hatter, a teaching artist at Houston Grand Opera, started her own opera company I Colori dell’opera (The Colors of Opera) to promote representation of people of color in the opera community. As I Colori’s Founder and Executive Director, Hatter is focused on creating opportunities for young artists to access music by African American and Latinx composers through performance and education. “As someone who needed to see people like me on stage before I took the leap into pursuing a career in opera, I want to give everyone the experience of seeing people of color perform on stage,” says Hatter. “And I especially want them to experience living composers of diverse backgrounds.”

Hatter believes that opera as an art form is experiencing a Renaissance. She mentions the emergence of the Blacknificent 7, a new collective of trailblazing black composers that includes HGO’s current Composer-in-Residence Joel Thompson, the revival of lost or forgotten music by Black and Latinx composers, and the push to commission new works that appeal to current and potential audiences as key elements in the revitalization of opera. Performers and audiences alike now have more access than ever before to music from a wide variety of countries and cultures.

“I think we have stepped into a niche that a lot of people touch on periodically, but do not dedicate significant programming to regularly,” says Hatter. “The entire team at I Colori is integrated into the Houston opera ecosystem. We all perform professionally in Houston with all the opera companies, and because we value each company, we look for ways to add value to the Houston opera community without doing something that another company would likely do.”

Recently I Colori hosted a sing-through of Chris Pratorius Gomez and Alan Olejnizak’s new bilingual opera Dreams Americanos, a modern retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac highlighting the experience of a group of Latin American immigrants living in the U.S. These are the stories Hatter would like to present alongside music by Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini. I Colori’s upcoming spring concert will spotlight performers and composers living in the Greater Houston area. “We have so many talented composers and singers here,” says Hatter. “The audience will absolutely love this music.”

Husband and wife team Chris and Sasha Holloway founded Opera Leggera in 2005 in the North Houston community of Kingwood. “Houston’s arts scene is amazing,” says Artistic Director Sasha Holloway, “but for families and audiences in the suburbs, getting downtown for a show isn’t always easy.” So they brought the stage to them, establishing Opera Leggera in Kingwood’s state-of-the-art Nathaniel Center. Holloway’s career had taken her from the Odessa State Opera and Ballet Theatre in the Ukraine to the Houston Grand Opera Chorus, while her husband performed in concert halls across the world. Although firmly grounded in classical opera, Holloway fell in love with American musical theater through her work with Theatre Under the Stars. “It really opened a new world. I felt this strong pull to create something of my own, a theatre company that could bring together the beauty of opera with the heart of Broadway.”

Twenty years later, Opera Leggera has grown into a thriving company set apart by its bold blending of musical styles. “We love opera, it’s in our name, which means ‘light opera,’ but we also incorporate musical theater, classic pop, international standards, jazz, comedy, and drama,” says Holloway. “We believe in storytelling that connects emotionally, no matter the genre.”

Opera Leggera will kick off its 20th season with its annual holiday show A Christmas to Remember. In March, the company will be celebrating Chris Holloway’s 50-year operatic career with a tribute concert called A Golden Voice. And the season will close with Cinema Fantastic, a nostalgic tribute to classic film music that blends iconic movie scores with live theater.

Holloway is grateful for the support the company has received from the community. “We are so fortunate to have so many loyal patrons who have been with us since the beginning and now have passed their love for our productions to their children and grandchildren. This kind of multigenerational support is something we are deeply proud of.”

These grassroots companies all agree that Houston is a great city for opera because there are so many outstanding singers who choose to live and make their careers here. Feeding the talent pool are two top-tier universities with superb opera programs. Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music upped its opera game with the completion of Brockman Hall for Opera in 2022. The University of Houston Moores Opera Center is recognized as a leading opera training program in the country. It is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a world premiere of acclaimed composer Tom Cipullo’s opera Hobson’s Choice as well as a double bill in the spring celebrating American composer Carlisle Floyd, who had a longstanding relationship with both the HGO and the University of Houston. “Fantastic big and medium sized companies like the HGO and Opera in the Heights already exist here,” says Berti (Hopera). “I think people are hungry for more. Houston should have more opera. Let’s do that.”

-SHERRY CHENG