OPERA HOUSES CREATE PARALLEL LIVES: LA OPERA’S “FALSTAFF”, DOROTHY CHANDLER PAVILION, AND CONSTRUCTING WORLDS WITH RUPERT HEMMING AND PAUL HOPPER

The final scene of LA Opera's 2026 production of Falstaff.   Photo credit: Cory Weaver

There are certain golden hour afternoons in Los Angeles that remind you why cities matter. Why culture matters. Why performance, across centuries and continents, continues to gather people into rooms together. Attending LA Opera’s production of Falstaff, directed by Lee Blakeley and conducted by James Conlon at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, reminded me of this immediately. Some productions succeed musically; others achieve something more difficult: they generate an entire social climate. Falstaff belonged to the latter category.

Giuseppe Verdi’s final opera, premiering in 1893 at Teatro alla Scala in Milan and adapted from William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and passages of Henry IV, occupies an unusual place in operatic history. Coming after decades of tragedy and monumen:tal emotional machinery, Verdi concluded his operatic career not with death, sacrifice, or catharsis, but with comedy. Yet Falstaff is not simply comic. It is social theater disguised as farce.

This production embraced that contradiction. From the moment the overture began inside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, I found myself completely absorbed, not only by the music but by the world opera quietly assembles around itself. Falstaff felt unusually complete, musically exacting, visually lucid, theatrical without excess. The singing remained buoyant and precise across the ensemble, and the production unfolded with the kind of confidence that reminds you opera remains one of the few truly total art forms, where costume, architecture, movement, music, lighting, and social ritual collapse into a single experience.

I found myself especially drawn to Sir John Falstaff himself. Ridiculous, vain, indulgent, endlessly performative—you almost want to reject him. Yet as the conspiracies around him accumulate and humiliation becomes collective entertainment, something stranger begins to emerge. There is cruelty hidden inside the comedy. By the end, one leaves less interested in punishment than in Verdi’s larger proposition: perhaps human folly belongs to all of us.

Visually, I have to hand it to the costume and scenic design. Adrian Linford’s opulent period ecology felt perpetually marvelous, lavish without becoming decorative for decoration’s sake, theatrical while preserving emotional clarity. The production moved through Windsor almost cinematically, creating the sensation of an entire civic organism unfolding before us. The cast operated with remarkable cohesion: Craig Colclough as Falstaff; Nicole Heaston as Alice Ford; Hyona Kim as Mistress Quickly; Ernesto Petti as Ford; Sarah Saturnino as Meg Page; Anthony León as Fenton; and Deanna Breiwick as Nannetta, the young lovers whose sincerity glows amid the absurdity. And perhaps nowhere was this more apparent than in the building itself.

Craig Colclough as Sir John Falstaff in LA Opera's 2026 production of Falstaff. (Photo: Cory Weaver)

Ernesto Petti as Ford and Craig Colclough as Sir John Falstaff in LA Opera's 2026 production of Falstaff. Photo credit: Cory Weaver

Nicole Heaston as Alice Ford in LA Opera's 2026 production of Falstaff. Photo credit: Cory Weaver

Dorothy Buffum Chandler remains one of those rare civic figures whose influence becomes difficult to separate from the city around her. More than a philanthropist, she reshaped Los Angeles’ understanding of culture as infrastructure. After helping rescue the Hollywood Bowl in 1951, she became convinced that Los Angeles could no longer imagine itself merely as a city of industry and film; it needed monumental spaces capable of competing with the great cultural capitals of the world. That ambition culminated in the opening of the Los Angeles Music Center in 1964, with the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at its center. Designed by Welton Becket in the language of New Formalism, the Pavilion feels almost impossible in contemporary Los Angeles. Elevated above the city on a massive podium, wrapped in monolithic pale colonnades and suspended behind reflective surfaces, the building feels less like a venue than a secular monument. Architecture enters my body before it enters my thoughts.

Last December in Athens, I spent nearly an entire day moving between the Parthenon and the Acropolis simply observing. Not photographing—observing. Watching how columns compress and release space, how shadow alters proportion, how entasis creates movement even in stone. One rainy evening, I found myself at the Odeon and met Professor Panagiotis Vasilatos of the National Technical University of Athens, who was there surveying and studying the site as part of preservation work. The entire place was illuminated against the dark sky, and the encounter itself felt strangely operatic. At one point, he began drawing for me, not casually, but carefully, mapping the site's levels and columnar systems, explaining procession, compression, elevation, and structural relationships. He spoke about the origin and quarrying of the original marble, and suddenly these monuments ceased being allegories and became matter. That stayed with me.

Walking through Dorothy Chandler, I unexpectedly thought about that evening. Of course, one is ancient, and one is mid-century, but both understand something fundamental: civic architecture is never neutral. It teaches people how to feel. The mirrored interiors, olive-chartreuse carpeting, theatrical staircases, and Duquette chandeliers produce a distinctly Los Angeles form of luxury, ceremonial, luminous, and unapologetically civic. I have long been fascinated by Tony Duquette and his environments and monumental sculptural works, their theatricality, excess, and strange cosmological quality. There is always something operatic about Duquette to me: too much texture, too much ornament, too much belief in beauty. The Pavilion also made me think about another opera house that has quietly accompanied much of my adult life. As someone who has been going to the Metropolitan Opera since college, I found myself thinking about how distinct Los Angeles feels. Over the years, I have probably been there more than fifty times—almost always on student tickets, occasionally ending up improbably close to the stage in the front rows. But what kept bringing me back was never only the performances themselves. Opera houses produce parallel biographies.

Some of my strongest memories of New York happened there. Sitting by myself at the fountain at Lincoln Center after a performance and simply thinking about the city. Wandering through intermission and ending up in conversations with volunteers and longtime patrons who knew hidden corners of the building and would quietly invite me upstairs and tell stories about the house between acts. One night after seeing La Bohème, I crossed the city with someone I was seeing and ended up at the Plaza Athénée on the Upper East Side. Somehow, the conversation drifted from Puccini to Sotheby’s auctions, collecting histories, and all the strange ways people construct beauty and value. Looking back, what I remember most is not even the conversation—it is the feeling that opera had generated the evening itself. Opera houses are never simply places to watch performances. They are social machines. Which is why arriving at Dorothy Chandler felt so different. The Metropolitan feels dense with accumulated memory. Los Angeles feels suspended in projection. And yet both understand the same thing: before the curtain rises, the performance has already begun. Sitting there, I realized I was becoming interested not only in what was being performed, but in the histories of performance itself. Watching Falstaff, I kept thinking less about opera itself and more about Los Angeles.

Long before cinema industrialized image-making, opera had already solved many of the questions Hollywood would later inherit: how costume reorganizes psychology, how architecture directs feeling, how lighting manufactures longing, how a room expands beyond its physical limits. Hollywood did not invent illusion. It operationalized it. One of the more fascinating moments in that lineage arrives in 1925, when Louis B. Mayer brought Erté to MGM. I became obsessed with that history while I was in college. I traced Erté’s movements across Los Angeles and eventually visited Nichols Canyon, where he once lived. Around the same time, I became fixated on a passage in his autobiography describing meeting George Bernard Shaw in the hills above Monaco. Later, standing in the Hollywood Hills, I found myself allowing those geographies to fold into one another. Monaco became Los Angeles. Opera became cinema. The studio became the stage. One afternoon in college, I projected Erté’s Spades gouache through a drawing board and traced it to create my own interpretation. Submitting myself to his lines taught me something I had not yet fully understood about space. The figures refused to remain figures. They became intervals,  compression, proportion, and rhythm. Negative space became as active as ornament. What appeared decorative turned out to be structural. Looking back, that exercise may have been one of my earliest lessons in understanding space not as something represented, but as something staged. And perhaps that is why Falstaff felt so successful with me. Not because it recreated history, but because it understood that performance has always been a technology for constructing worlds. Perhaps this is why this conversation fascinated me so much.

In the following conversation with Paul Hopper and Rupert Hemming of LA Opera’s executive artistic planning, we discuss repertoire, season building, scenic construction, artistic collaboration, audience development, and the possibilities for opera’s future. Opera persists not by preserving history but by repeatedly setting it back in motion. And perhaps that is what makes it one of the strangest contemporary art forms we have.

Let’s begin.

Vinícius Costa as Pistol, Craig Colclough as Sir John Falstaff, and Yuntong Han as Bardolph in LA Opera's 2026 production of Falstaff. Photo credit: Cory Weaver

Interview

AMADOUR: I want to start by sharing some context. I realized I brought some assumptions from New York into this conversation. For me, opera was always connected to the Metropolitan Opera and ideas like ritual, architecture, and returning to see certain productions again and again. Even some overtures felt almost architectural in my memory. Although I’ve spent a lot of time in both Los Angeles and New York and worked in contemporary art and performance, I had never actually been to LA Opera, which felt odd to admit. I reached out because I want to expand WHO IS SEEN into more interdisciplinary conversations, and opera seemed like a natural place to start since it brings together music, architecture, images, performance, costumes, and design. So I want to begin with a simple question: when you build a season at LA Opera, do you think more like a curator, a dramaturg, or a storyteller? How does that process start?

RUPERT HEMMINGS:
All three. I think that balance shifts depending on where you are and what responsibilities your institution carries. You mentioned the Met, and they operate on a completely different scale. Depending on the year, they may present somewhere around eighteen productions. That creates a very different set of possibilities, as they have more opportunities to represent the operatic canon within a single season.

We put on fewer productions, so each one becomes more consequential. People come to opera looking for very different things. Some audiences want Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppe Verdi, or Richard Wagner and are primarily interested in the central repertoire. Others are interested in Benjamin Britten, Philip Glass, or more experimental and contemporary work. No matter what we choose, someone will always wish we had chosen something else. That’s why we have to think beyond a single season. If you look at five or six productions across multiple years, you start to see a broader artistic picture emerge. Seasons begin speaking to past seasons and future ones. Interpretation is also extremely important to us. Stage direction matters. Musical quality matters. The singers matter. What happens in the orchestra pit matters. Our goal isn’t simply to present repertoire, but to make it feel alive. Paul?

PAUL HOPPER:
Our priorities change based on what feels most exciting artistically. Sometimes we start with a specific opera we want to do, and then we decide which production to use. Other times, one of us sees a production somewhere else and wonders if it would work in Los Angeles. Sometimes, it’s the artist who leads the process. We ask ourselves who we want to bring here, who is available, and who could create something unique.

This season was special because it’s our music director James Conlon’s last one with the company. That gave us a meaningful theme. For example, Falstaff is one of Conlon’s favorite operas and was the first one he conducted professionally after his training. There’s also an interesting connection: Falstaff is Verdi’s last opera. So, we have a conductor finishing a twenty-year career and a composer writing his final piece. These connections become part of how we build a season. Programming isn’t just practical—it tells a story.

AMADOUR:
That made me wonder something broader. What do you think opera can still do that film or streaming media cannot? Why should somebody still go sit in an opera house today?

RUPERT HEMMINGS:
My first answer is that opera is live. Films and streaming are recordings—you can watch them over and over, and they don’t change. Opera is different. If you see Falstaff three times, each performance will be a little different. Being in a room with thousands of people and seeing something happen in real time changes the experience. You hear real voices and real instruments, not engineered sound. You never know exactly how the performance will go. That unpredictability and sense of presence are important. Streaming hasn’t replaced that yet.

PAUL HOPPER:
I think people often talk about opera in almost spiritual terms. You gather with strangers, sit together, and watch something unfold as a group. There’s a ritual feeling to it. Theater and musicals have some of that, but opera is unique because it brings together so many art forms—costume, set design, lighting, projection, dance, music, singing, and architecture. It’s a meeting point for all these things. People come for different reasons: some love the singers, some love the visual spectacle, and some just want the experience. We welcome everyone, whether they show up in tuxedos or jeans. Both are welcome.

AMADOUR:
Another thing I kept thinking about is the space itself. In opera, architecture is a big part of the experience. The room isn’t just a backdrop—it affects how voices sound, how people gather, and even how we remember performances. So I’m curious about Dorothy Chandler not just as a venue, but as an instrument. What makes this building special for opera? How is it different from other places? And do music directors or administrators see the space differently than the audience does?

RUPERT HEMMINGS:
We all really like this building, and many of us have been here for years, so there’s a mix of affection and practicality. The building works very well for us. The size is great—the Metropolitan Opera seats about 4,000, and we’re a bit smaller at just over 3,000. That changes how the room feels. You still get a sense of scale, but there’s more intimacy. Our stage also lets us put on almost any production we want, whether it starts here or comes from somewhere else.

But there’s more than just how the building works. There’s something historical and very Los Angeles about it. People sometimes forget that for nearly three decades the Academy Awards were held here. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion hosted 25 Academy Awards ceremonies between 1969 and 1999, becoming one of the defining performance spaces in Los Angeles during that period, switching between this building and the Shrine. For years, this was the place for those big nights. That might not answer your question directly, but it shows that this building has always been connected to performance and public life in Los Angeles.

Some people criticize the acoustics, but I actually disagree. I’ve sat in many different places in the house, and I think it sounds great. Acoustics in opera houses often become a kind of myth—people repeat things until they seem true. In my experience, Dorothy Chandler sounds very good.

Paul?

PAUL HOPPER:
The first time I came here, I wasn’t working here yet. I was still at the Met and had come out to look for singers before I even had this job. I remember arriving at the plaza level and feeling something different right away. My first thought was that it felt like stepping into old Hollywood. The building has a cinematic quality that feels very Los Angeles.

Inside, there are lots of memorable design choices. There’s a chartreuse green carpet that I’ve never seen anywhere else [the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was designed by architect Welton Becket and Welton Becket & Associates in 1964 as part of the Los Angeles Music Center; Becket’s modernist “total design” approach extended down to interiors, materials, chandeliers, and finishes, giving the building its distinctly theatrical but unusually airy atmosphere]. Most opera houses use reds, neutrals, and old-world colors, but here, there’s a bold use of color. The building’s design makes spaces feel bigger and more open than they really are. And then there’s the light.

That’s what really stood out to me.

At the Met, there’s a beautiful darkness—it feels enclosed and ceremonial. Here, there’s so much glass. As you go up in the front of house, natural light pours in through huge windows. You can see downtown and the mountains. It feels both indoors and outdoors at once. I remember thinking, maybe a bit dramatically, that I could forget the Met because this felt so different. Not better or worse, just unique and very Los Angeles.

There’s also an upstairs hall that I always recommend people visit. When you go up and see the chandeliers, the open space, and the views, it all makes sense. You realize this building isn’t trying to copy Europe or New York—it feels like it truly belongs here.

AMADOUR:
That surprised me, because as I listened, I realized I had picked up certain ideas from New York and from opera in general. I thought opera should feel enclosed, heavy, with velvet, gold, and dim lighting. But you both described openness, movement, daylight, and people coming in different ways. It made me think that architecture and institutions are similar—they both shape who feels welcome.

I want to ask you both something more personal, because those stories often reveal more than official language. Was there a production or experience early on that changed how you saw opera? Does that still influence your work today? I’m also thinking about younger people who might feel opera is hard to get into. How did each of you find your way here?

PAUL HOPPER:
I started out as a performer. I trained as a singer and earned two degrees, planning to become an opera singer, before moving into administration and artistic management. So, I see my life in opera in two parts: one where I imagined being on stage, and one where I now help decide who gets to be on stage.

The experience I remember most happened when I worked at Houston Grand Opera. At the start of the 2017–2018 season, Hurricane Harvey flooded the theater, and our whole season was in doubt. For my last season there, we couldn’t use our usual building. Instead of canceling, the company created an improvised theater inside a convention center.

It seemed impossible and even a little crazy, but we made it work. What stands out to me isn’t the logistics, but one production: Richard Strauss’s Elektra [1909 opera based on the Greek tragedy, famous for its explosive orchestration, psychological intensity, and overwhelming emotional force]. It’s a huge piece with a big orchestra, powerful voices, and intense emotions. Because of the temporary setup, there was no orchestra pit—the orchestra played behind the set. The audience sat very close to the performers. I remember sitting there, thinking I knew opera, but I had never experienced it like this. The front row was about ten feet away. You could actually feel the singers—not just emotionally, but physically. The sound vibrated through your chest.

I realized that if opera could survive a flood, move to a convention center, and still feel so powerful and alive, maybe I had been thinking too narrowly about what opera could be. That experience stuck with me. Now, as I oversee our young artist program, which is like an apprenticeship for new professionals, I always encourage people not to get stuck on fixed ideas. Opera can happen in a grand theater, a parking garage, a cathedral, or somewhere unexpected. You might wear a period costume or something very modern. If the experience is honest, the format matters less than people think.

RUPERT HEMMINGS:
What Paul said really resonates with me. For me, there wasn’t one specific production that changed everything. I’ve seen opera in many places over the years, and what I love most is that every experience is different. But if I had to pick a moment that changed my relationship to opera, it wasn’t as an audience member—it was while working. I was an apprentice at Santa Fe Opera when I was about nineteen or twenty, and that changed everything. Santa Fe is outdoors.

So my memories aren’t of one moment, but a collection of images. I remember arriving before the audience, seeing empty seats, snow on the stage, and technical rehearsals. I saw productions as unfinished projects before they became performances. Over four months, I watched five operas come to life. I saw artists and technicians care deeply about their work. People built things that audiences would only see for a few hours. When the audience finally arrived, what struck me most wasn’t just the quality of the performance, but how much everyone cared. Opera audiences tend to choose to be there. People organize trips around opera. They travel. They discuss productions. They compare casts. There’s a level of devotion that’s unusual. And seeing all those layers at once made me realize this wasn’t simply entertainment. There was something emotionally satisfying and strangely total about it. It was an ecosystem. People sometimes ask me what my favorite opera is. Or my favorite production. And my answer is almost always whatever I’m working on right now. Not because I don’t have preferences, but because I think the only honest way to do this work is to commit yourself fully to what’s in front of you. Otherwise, why do it?

PAUL HOPPER:
For me, it might still be Elektra. After that experience, I can’t hear that music without thinking of that room. It changed how I think about scale in opera.

AMADOUR:
Mine is probably Madame Butterfly. I’ve seen it many times at the Met. I also love Akhnaten [Philip Glass’s 1983 minimalist opera about the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, known for its hypnotic repetitions, ritual atmosphere, and Robert Lepage’s celebrated production featuring large-scale juggling and sculptural movement], which is completely different. Those two have stayed with me.

RUPERT HEMMINGS:
That’s actually a great combination. They’re very different kinds of obsessions.

Sarah Saturnino as Meg Page, Craig Colclough as Falstaff, Nicole Heaston as Alice Ford and Hyona Kim as Mistress Quickly in LA Opera's 2026 production of Falstaff. Photo credit: Cory Weaver

Ernesto Petti as Ford in LA Opera's 2026 production of Falstaff. Photo credit: Cory Weaver

Nicole Heaston as Alice Ford and Craig Colclough as Sir John Falstaff in LA Opera's 2026 production of Falstaff. Photo credit: Cory Weaver

The final scene of LA Opera's 2026 production of  Falstaff, with Craig Colclough as Sir John Falstaff (far left). Photo credit: Cory Weaver

Yuntong Han as Bardolph, Vinícius Costa as Pistol, Hyona Kim as Mistress Quickly and Craig Colclough as Sir John Falstaff in LA Opera's 2026 production of Falstaff.   Photo credit: Cory Weaver

Deanna Breiwick as Nannetta and Anthony León as Fenton in LA Opera's 2026 production of Falstaff. Photo credit: Cory Weaver

Nathan Bowles as Dr. Caius in LA Opera's 2026 production of Falstaff. Photo credit: Cory Weaver

The Act Two finale of LA Opera's 2026 production of Falstaff. Photo credit: Cory Weaver

PAUL HOPPER:
That Anthony Minghella Butterfly is amazing [the celebrated production of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly directed by Anthony Minghella, the Academy Award–winning filmmaker behind The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley; first premiered at English National Opera in 2005 and later brought to the Metropolitan Opera, it became known for its stylized movement, visible puppetry, minimalist staging, and cinematic visual language]. I always joke that people who love Madame Butterfly are masochists. We know exactly how it ends, and it’s heartbreaking, but we keep coming back because it moves us every time.

AMADOUR:
And Akhnaten for me was almost hypnotic. The juggling, movement, and repetition. It almost felt spiriAkhnaten felt almost hypnotic to me. The juggling, movement, and repetition made it feel almost spiritual. And audiences understand instinctively that they’re entering something completely different. You can feel it almost immediately.

AMADOUR:
One thing I noticed while listening to both of you is the tension between tradition and experimentation. Opera is often seen as conservative because of its history and size, but your answers have all involved change, interpretation, collaboration, and movement. I’m curious where you see opera going next. I’m also interested in casting, since opera is unique in how it balances sound, space, personality, presence, history, and performance. How do you think about these questions from inside the institution?

PAUL HOPPER:
I think the next big topic is technology, especially AI, though people aren’t sure yet what that will mean for opera. There are questions about whether AI will be used in creating the work, or in design, production, sets, visuals, and new ways of staging.

Rupert has explored ideas like modular sets, LED environments, and ways to use technology in production design. But one challenge in opera is its scale. I often compare it to a ship—the bigger it is, the harder it is to turn. Large institutions plan productions years ahead, coordinate artists from around the world, and manage budgets, tours, rehearsals, and schedules. That doesn’t mean opera can’t change, but change happens differently. Smaller groups can adapt quickly, while bigger ones need more time and effort to shift direction. This is true both artistically and in how we cast shows.

Usually, once we’re moving toward a title and beginning to narrow time periods and production calendars, I start thinking about availability. Who is free? Who makes sense? Who could realistically work together? And then immediately after that, the artistic questions begin.  There are productions where you can build around a single performance. There are others where ensemble chemistry matters more than individual brilliance. Falstaff is a good example because people are constantly interacting. It’s a comedy. Timing matters. Physicality matters. Someone might sing magnificently, but if they stand still and don’t inhabit the world physically, the whole thing can collapse. So voice matters enormously. But so does movement, stage intelligence, comedic instinct, reliability, and energy. And then there’s architecture again, American houses tend to be large. Someone might be extraordinary in an 800-seat European house and suddenly feel completely different in a room three times that size. So there’s always this strange overlap between artistry and engineering. You’re imagining people in a room before they ever enter it.

AMADOUR:
Earlier, I had asked something and realized afterward that my recorder had stopped recording, which felt very on-brand for a conversation about live performance and impermanence. But one thing I wanted to come back to was collaboration, because I was struck by something you both mentioned earlier about visual artists and directors entering opera. Coming from contemporary art, I was especially curious about how Los Angeles changes that conversation.

RUPERT HEMMINGS:
From the company's inception, there was recognition that being an opera company in Los Angeles should mean something. And for us, who developed in two directions. One was through film. We’ve worked with film directors extensively and probably more than many opera companies. The second was through contemporary art and design. Very early on, there was an understanding that if opera is already an interdisciplinary form, then why shouldn’t it actively engage with people working at the highest level across adjacent disciplines?

That’s led to collaborations with artists including David Hockney [the British painter who designed sets and costumes for opera beginning in the 1970s and whose 1988 production of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress for LA Opera became one of the company’s defining early visual statements, translating his flattened perspective, saturated color, and California-inflected sense of space directly onto the stage], Achim Freyer [the German painter, sculptor, and stage director whose visually maximal and psychologically symbolic productions became closely associated with LA Opera, including his staging of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle (2010–2013), known for masks, painted surfaces, and dreamlike theatrical tableaux], and many others across visual culture, costume, and production design. Christian Lacroix comes to mind too [the French haute couture designer who created costumes for multiple opera productions, including LA Opera’s 2007 staging of Jules Massenet’s Thaïs, bringing couture-level ornamentation, historical references, and theatrical silhouette into operatic costume design].

What becomes exciting is that these artists don’t arrive trying to imitate opera. They arrive bringing the language of their own discipline. That changes things. It changes how stories look. It changes how audiences read images. It changes what feels possible. And to me, that feels contemporary. That feels like acknowledging the world we actually live in. The other Los Angeles relationship is Hollywood more broadly. Historically, we’ve always tried to cultivate that connection. And I’ll say something that maybe sounds contradictory. Part of me wants to say it’s not because celebrity matters. But honestly, that’s probably not entirely true. Visibility matters. Attention matters. When public figures enter a room, who pays attention changes. Historically, we’ve had everyone from actors to major cultural figures coming through the opera. People like Tom Cruise in earlier years, and countless others. And while that isn’t the point of the institution, it does create energy. It creates permeability. People suddenly realize opera isn’t isolated. At the same time, none of that means abandoning rigor. We’re not interested in novelty for novelty’s sake. The dramaturgy still matters. You can experiment all you want. But it still has to serve the piece.

PAUL HOPPER:
And I think what becomes rewarding in those collaborations is that people who are already masters of their own field enter opera with curiosity. They’re suddenly beginners again. There’s something really refreshing about watching somebody at the top of their game encounter a different medium and ask questions they normally don’t get to ask. That openness ends up benefiting everybody. And I think audiences feel that too. You can feel when somebody is discovering something.

AMADOUR:
To close, I wanted to ask something that felt important, because throughout our conversation, one thing kept returning: the idea that opera is constantly expanding beyond what people imagine it to be. We talked about architecture, visual artists, technology, interpretation, seasonal building, and all these different points of entry, but I kept thinking about audience and geography too. LA Opera occupies such a significant place physically and culturally within Los Angeles, and Los Angeles itself is such a fragmented and sprawling city that I became curious about how you think about collaborating with other institutions, outreach to younger audiences, and building relationships beyond Downtown. I was also curious about the education programs and what people should be paying attention to in the future.

RUPERT HEMMINGS:
There are really multiple points of contact for us there. The first thing that comes to mind is our education department, LA Opera Connects, which Paul and I are involved with in different ways. They do extraordinary work out in the community, and they think very broadly about what access means. Their work extends across schools, universities, libraries, hospitals, senior communities, and other educational and public spaces throughout Los Angeles. What’s interesting is that they don’t approach those places as though one format fits all situations. There are many different programs designed for different audiences and stages of life. They even have an opera experience designed specifically for infants called BambinO, which always makes me smile because when you step back and think about it, they’re really creating experiences across nearly the entire arc of life, and everything in between.

Beyond LA Opera Connects, another major initiative for us is Off Grand, which began about 12 years ago from a fairly simple realization: if we call ourselves Los Angeles Opera, then we should actually perform throughout Los Angeles, not just in Downtown. That wasn’t initially motivated by trying to drive audiences back into our theater. Obviously, if that happens, we’re happy, but the larger motivation was recognizing that our responsibility is to bring the art form outward. Sometimes that means a recital with one singer and one piano in front of fifty people. Other times, it means something enormous, like our annual simulcast at the Santa Monica Pier, where 4,000 to 6,000 people gather to watch a live performance transmitted from Downtown. We partner with the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) at the Walt Disney Concert Hall campus, with the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, with The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage in Santa Monica, with the United Theater on Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles, with the Colburn School, with the Musco Center for the Arts at Chapman University, and with many others depending on the project. We think of accessibility as movement. People shouldn’t always have to come to us. Sometimes we should go to them.

PAUL HOPPER:
I think one of the challenges of producing work in Los Angeles is simply understanding the city's physical reality. LA County is so large that it’s impossible to be everywhere simultaneously, which means flexibility becomes essential. Downtown remains our home base and where we present what I jokingly call capital “O” Opera, meaning the full theatrical apparatus: the orchestra, the scale, the machinery, the architecture, the entire experience of being inside a major opera house. But the smaller the project, the more nimble and responsive we can be in the community. One example that’s happening this weekend through Connects is our annual community opera at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, right around the corner. What I love about that project is that it reflects almost everything we’ve been discussing. There are professional singers performing the principal roles and professional musicians in the orchestra, but surrounding them are hundreds of community participants.

There’s a community choir that reaches nearly 300 people. There are amateur musicians. There are children. There are families. There are people who might never otherwise imagine themselves participating in opera. This year, it’s Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde [1958 community opera based on the medieval Chester Mystery Plays and the biblical story of Noah’s Ark, written specifically to combine professional musicians with children, amateur performers, and local communities in a large-scale participatory performance], which already lends itself beautifully to that kind of gathering because of its scale and communal structure. And when you actually experience it, it stops feeling like outreach and becomes something more fundamental. You see families showing up to support people they know. You see professionals and community members performing side by side. You see children realizing they belong in a space they may have assumed wasn’t for them. It becomes less about introducing opera and more about creating a shared event where people feel ownership over the experience.

AMADOUR:
What stayed with me, listening to both of you, was that I kept expecting the conversation to return to preservation, to protecting tradition or maintaining a canon, and instead what emerged was something much more active and expansive. Season building became storytelling. Architecture became hospitality. Casting became spatial thinking. Technology became an adaptation. Outreach became a movement. What struck me most was that opera was never described as static. It felt closer to an ecosystem that changes depending on where it appears and who enters the room.

Whether someone experiences opera under chandeliers in a 3000-seat theater, at Santa Monica Pier with thousands of strangers, in a hospital, through a visual artist, through a child’s first encounter, or simply by showing up in jeans because they were curious, the goal seemed less about preserving distance and more about creating opportunities for encounter. I came into the conversation thinking mostly about repertoire and productions and left thinking much more about institutions, infrastructure, audiences, and all the invisible labor required to make those experiences possible. Thank you both for your time. I’m excited to experience the performance and continue following what you build here.

Deanna Breiwick as Nannetta in LA Opera's 2026 production of Falstaff.   Photo credit: Cory Weaver