There is a moment in every great opera when the music soars to an emotional peak, a voice hits a note that stops time, and a story takes a turn that leaves the whole room breathless. The audience leans forward without realizing it, and hushed in the darkened theater comes a quiet gasp of "...ooooh, OPERA!"
Opera Orlando has built an entire season for these exact moments.
This season, Opera Orlando arrives with a whole lot of something new. A fresh visual identity built from a conviction the Company has always known to be true: opera belongs here, to this city, to everyone in it. Opera is a cultural column, and Orlando is the foundation that holds it upright. The mark, the language, the colors, the voice. All of it drawn from the work itself, and all of it pointed toward what comes next.
With that momentum, the Company announces its 2026-27 season of six productions across three venues. The season opens on the MainStage this fall at Dr. Phillips Center’s Steinmetz Hall and reaches into the city's neighborhoods, its schools, and its unexpected spaces before closing back at Steinmetz Hall in May with a centennial celebration of an American classic.
"Opera is the most expressive, most athletic, most completely alive and visceral art form that exists," says artistic director Grant Preisser. "A singer stands on a stage with an orchestra playing at full force from the pit, and with no microphone their voice fills the hall connecting the music directly with the audience. Nothing is amplified. Nothing is enhanced. What you hear is a human being at the absolute limit of what a human being can do — and somehow it's also the most beautiful thing you've ever heard. We designed this season so that more people in Central Florida can be in the room where it happens."
The 2026-27 season Opera on the MainStage series at Dr. Phillips Center opens in October with Puccini's heartbreaking and beloved work, Madame Butterfly. Cio-Cio San is newly married to an American naval officer who almost immediately returns to the States. She is certain he will return to her and waits three years to find out if she is right. Puccini surrounds her story with music of such tenderness and such inevitability that audiences who have seen it a dozen times still find themselves undone by the final act. There really is no preparation for what Puccini does at that moment. There is only the music, the voice, and the whole room holding their breath "...ooooh, OPERA!"
Soprano Yeawon Jun makes her Opera Orlando debut in the title role, joined by tenor Isaac Hurtado singing the role of Lt. Pinkerton, a role for which his “passionate intensity” has been praised. Kalena Bovell, the 2024 Sphinx Medal of Excellence recipient and the first Black woman to conduct an opera in Canada, makes her Company debut on the podium. Stage direction comes from Rebecca A. Herman, whose work spans Austin Opera, Madison Opera, and the Glimmerglass Festival, in her own Company debut.
January brings an Opera Orlando first. Flying Dutchman marks the Company's first Wagner production — and Wagner does not arrive quietly. The Dutchman is a sailor cursed to sail the seas for eternity, permitted ashore once every seven years to find a woman willing to be faithful unto death. What happens when he finds her is the question, and the music has such raw power that it feels less like something composed than something elemental, dredged up from the ocean floor.
"There is nothing like Wagner in the repertoire," says general director Gabriel Preisser. "The sheer physical force of the music, the way it builds and builds and then arrives somewhere you weren't prepared for, it is an experience that gets inside you and stays there. As a Company we have reached a level to produce truly grand opera. The moment is right, and this cast is extraordinary."
When the Dutchman's theme rises from the pit, filling Steinmetz Hall, the whole room will be caught in its wake "...ooooh, OPERA!"
Baritone Darren Drone — praised by Opera News for his "gorgeously warm tone and deep resonance" and a rising presence at the Metropolitan Opera and Glimmerglass Festival — returns to Orlando in the title role, joined by German soprano Johanna Will, making her Company debut as Senta, a role for which she has been praised for her vocal power and dramatic commitment. Conductor Geoffrey Loff, now assistant to the music director at Komische Oper Berlin and a 2023 Solti Foundation US grant recipient, returns to the Opera Orlando podium, with production concept and stage direction by Grant Preisser.
Spring arrives with Donizetti’s irresistible comedy and the season’s most purely joyful evening, Elixir of Love, graciously supported by AdventHealth. Inspired by Fellini's La Dolce Vita — its glamour, absurdity, and impossible longing — this production lands on the backlot of a 1960s film studio in Rome. Nemorino is an aspiring screenwriter hopelessly in love with Adina, the studio's reigning star. Helping this rom-com along: Dulcamara, the lot's fast-talking food truck impresario, and a bottle of very dubious wine he's calling a love potion. It probably won't work. It does. And then, without warning, "Una furtiva lagrima…" — Nemorino alone with his feelings and the whole theater suddenly alone with theirs "...ooooh, OPERA!"
Soprano Nola Richardson — praised by the New York Times as "especially impressive" and the Washington Post for her "astonishing balance and accuracy" — makes her Company debut as Adina. Tenor Randy Ho makes his Company debut as Nemorino and Metropolitan Opera national competition finalist baritone Eleomar Cuello makes his Company debut as Belcore. Bass-baritone Robert Mellon, acclaimed by Opera News for his "excellent comic timing" and a "domineering baritone, gleaming like polished copper," is the affable charlatan Dulcamara. Maria Sensi Sellner makes her Company debut conducting, with production concept and stage direction by Grant Preisser.
The season closes in May with another Company first. Show Boat, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's landmark American musical, comes to Steinmetz Hall in a semi-staged concert production in partnership with the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra and Bethune-Cookman University. Opera Orlando reunites with the creative team that brought Treemonisha to the Alexis & Jim Pugh Theater in the 2024-25 season to bring this original adaptation of the musical to life: stage director Roberta Emerson, OPERA America grant recipient and one of Orlando's most versatile theatrical voices, and conductor Dr. Everett McCorvey, founder and music director of the American Spiritual Ensemble, who has conducted two premieres with the Company. A hundred years after it first shook Broadway, Show Boat still has things to say, and this is the right team to say them. Show Boat is available as a special event add-on for MainStage subscribers.
Beyond the MainStage, the season reaches further than any in the Company's history.
In December and in partnership with The Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Florida, the Opera Orlando Youth Company takes the stage at Orlando Family Stage with Brundibár / Vedem — two works born inside the Theresienstadt concentration camp during World War II. Hans Krása's children's opera Brundibár was performed by children imprisoned at Theresienstadt over fifty times, while Lori Laitman’s Vedem draws from the underground literary magazine written by teenage boys in the same camp, boys who chose to make art in the most impossible circumstances imaginable.
In March, Ástor Piazzolla and Horacio Ferrer's María de Buenos Aires transforms 1010 West Church Street into an Argentinian tango club. Piazzolla's bandoneon-scorched score tells the story of María — who dies, is reborn, and dances through it all. The audience doesn't just watch. They're inside Piazzolla and Ferrer’s world, surrounded by their words and music, the movement, the food, and the heat of Buenos Aires nightlife.
OPERA ORLANDO’S 2026-27 SEASON
OPERA ON THE MAINSTAGE / Steinmetz Hall at Dr. Phillips Center
Madame Butterfly / October 2-4, 2026*
Flying Dutchman / January 22-24, 2027*
Elixir of Love / April 23-25, 2027
SPECIAL EVENT / Steinmetz Hall at Dr. Phillips Center
Show Boat / May 14-16, 2027*
* Saturday evening performance now added for all Steinmetz Hall productions.
OPERA FOR THE COMMUNITY / Orlando Family Stage
Brundibár / Vedem / December 12-13, 2026
OPERA ON SITE / 1010 West Church Street
María de Buenos Aires / March 4-6, 2027
SUBSCRIBE AND SAVE …ooooh, OPERA!
Three and four-show subscriptions — Madame Butterfly, Flying Dutchman, Elixir of Love, Show Boat add-on — are available now. Subscribers save up to $150 on series packages with special season launch pricing available through July 4.
Get ready to be moved, amazed, and completely swept away. Purchase MainStage subscriptions through the Dr. Phillips Center Box Office at DrPhillipsCenter.org or (407) 839-0119. For all other tickets or for more information connect with the Opera Orlando box office at OperaOrlando.org or (407) 512-1900 ext.0.
See YOU at the Opera!
ABOUT OPERA ORLANDO
Opera Orlando produces opera in Central Florida — fully, seriously, and for everyone. Now in its eleventh season, the Company presents MainStage productions, educational programs, and community performances rooted in the conviction that this art form belongs to this city. Opera Orlando's Youth Company program and Apprentice and Studio Artists programs develop the next generation of opera talent for and from within the community it serves. (OperaOrlando.org)
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Opera Orlando
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Gabriel Preisser General Director
- May 21, 2026
- (407) 512-1900 x3
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