Boheme+Broadway: Austin Opera marks 40th anniversary

Is it strange for an opera company to stage Fiddler on the Roof? Showcasing the Broadway landmark makes total sense to Annie Burridge, Austin Opera’s CEO.

“With some of these classic pieces…we can add a level of artistic excitement to them and produce them in a way that you’re not going to see on Broadway,” Burridge says. “You can’t fit a 50-piece orchestra into a Broadway pit. And we can bring incredible voices—not only from the musical theater world, but from other crossover or operatic genres.”

Other opera companies have taken this same tack, of course. Houston Grand Opera has staged a series of Stephen Sondheim shows, and in 2024 it enlisted opera luminary Isabel Leonard to star as Maria in The Sound of Music. Austin’s staging of Fiddler (Feb. 5, 7 and 8) will feature Broadway veteran Steven Skybell as Tevye, the patriarch of a Jewish family in a fictional Russian village.

Skybell landed a Tony nomination in 2024 for his performance as Herr Schultz in Cabaret, Burridge notes. An Off-Broadway stint as Tevye—a role Skybell can perform in either English or Yiddish, Burridge adds—won him a Lucille Lortel Award and other honors. “We’re so excited to have an accomplished Broadway performer who also is so strongly rooted in the tradition of the piece,” Burridge says.

She also savors what Broadway shows can do for the box office. “They’re tremendous at attracting audiences,” Burridge says. “Fiddler on the Roof is selling at triple the rate of La Boheme”—the other main production in Austin Opera’s coming season. “We’re gonna get a lot of folks into our doors.”

To salute the company’s 40th anniversary, the season will open with a program dubbed Celebrate Opera! Conductor Timothy Myers, the company’s music director, will lead the Austin Opera Orchestra and Chorus and four guest soloists in favorite numbers from the likes of Verdi’s Aida, Puccini’s Tosca and Bizet’s Carmen (Nov. 15-16).

The soloists will be headed up by soprano Leah Crocetto, who has performed Aida and other leading roles with such top companies as the Metropolitan Opera and Washington National Opera. Not only does she boast “a large, gorgeous soprano voice,” Burridge says, but Crocetto has been one of Austin’s musical resources since 2022, when she joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin.

“So now we have this soprano who lives in town,” Burridge says with relish. Crocetto debuted with Austin Opera last winter in Verdi’s Requiem, and she contributed “one of the most moving performances that I’ve had the pleasure to be a part of,” Burridge recalls. In the November program, Crocetto will sing one of Aida’s arias and other “big, juicy soprano pieces,” Burridge adds. The soloists also include tenor Jonathan Burton, who returns to Austin after playing the murderously jealous Canio in Mascagni’s Pagliacci in 2023.

Alongside the operatic favorites, the November program will showcase an excerpt from a work-in-progress being midwifed by the company. Ofrenda, by Mexican-born composer Jorge Sosa, is a Day of the Dead story involving “a mother and daughter and ancestors who are gone,” Burridge says.

“It’s about a mother who immigrated from Mexico and her daughter, who was born in America and in many ways is a typical American teenager,” Burridge explains. “The mother works at a hospital, and one night as she’s going home from work, she encounters death on the bus. She is kind to this manifestation of death, and death gives her a very special vial of her own tears, which has healing properties.” Ofrenda will have “a touch of the mystical,” Burridge adds, but at its heart, it’s “a gorgeous, multigenerational story rooted in today’s Texas.”

Composer Sosa and Ofrenda are part of an Austin Opera residency program “for the development of new Latinx operatic works that tell stories and perspectives from south of the border,” Burridge says. As she marks her 10th anniversary as the company’s leader, Burridge takes pride in partnering with the city’s Mexican consulate and building partnerships with that community.

In another example of that push, the company last year brought a new flavor to Jose “Pepe” Martinez’s Cruzar la Cara de la Luna, the mariachi-style opera that Houston Grand Opera premiered in 2010. The co-production by Austin Opera and Minnesota Opera replaced the original instrumentation, which employed a mariachi band onstage, with a new setting that combined a mariachi trio onstage with an orchestra in the pit. The new version “worked out very beautifully,” Burridge recalls. “We hope (it) will enable the piece to be performed at even more opera companies.”

Returning to current plans: The season will culminate in Puccini’s eternally young story of whirlwind love, La Boheme (April 30-May 3). Soprano Hailey Clark, who played the free-spirited Nedda in Pagliacci for Austin Opera in 2023, will return as the fragile seamstress Mimi. Thinking back to Pagliacci, Burridge salutes Clark’s “huge, beautiful voice” and “ability to sing incredible pianissimos at the top of her range.” As “a recovering coloratura myself,” Burridge says with a chuckle, she’s “in awe of (Clark’s) technical command over her instrument.”

Clark will be portraying Mimi for her first time, Burridge adds. Offering up-and-coming singers a chance to tackle new parts is a favorite Austin Opera strategy.

“We’ve got an incredibly friendly audience here,” Burridge says. “Singers love to work with Timothy Myers. The acoustics in the Long Center are really favorable. So it’s kind of our sweet spot—offering singers the opportunity to do something they haven’t done before, or to try something out in what feels like a safer place before they’re going to do it at the Met or Chicago.”

As the coming season unfolds, Austin Opera will also oversee a big project outside the theater. It’s renovating a building—purchased last year—that will become its headquarters.

“We’re all working from our homes while that building undergoes a major retrofit,” Burridge says. Along with a 200-seat performance space and four rehearsal studios, “we’ll finally have our own costume shop that won’t be just a corner of an un-air-conditioned warehouse. We’ll have 300 free parking spots and a gorgeous event space. We’re gearing up to be not only Austin’s opera company, but (to be) running a performing arts center by this time next year.”

—STEVEN BROWN