Long Beach Opera is once again making a case for opera as something far more unruly and adventurous than the traditional image of a grand theater and a velvet curtain.
For its 2026-27 season, the company will take audiences aboard an ocean liner, into the rehearsal room and into intimate performance spaces, presenting works that range from Baroque masterpieces to contemporary experimental music — and a new opera still in development.
The season will open Sept. 26 aboard the Queen Mary, with three works by genre-defying composer Georges Aperghis: “Le corps à corps,” “Les Sept Crimes de l’amour” and “Récitations.”
Artistic Director James Darrah Black directs, with Music Director Christopher Rountree conducting a cast that includes soprano Habin Kim, synth-pop performance artist and electronic musician Geneva Jacuzzi, percussionist Brian Cannady, and soprano saxophonist M.A. Tiesenga.
It’s a typical beginning for a company that has spent years challenging expectations about what opera can be, as Aperghis’ works blur the boundaries between music, theater and physical performance.
“Le corps à corps,” for example, turns a percussionist’s vocalizations into a dramatic account of an intense foot race, while “Les Sept Crimes de l’amour” combines music, movement and props, and “Récitations pushes the solo voice into extended techniques that emphasize both its virtuosity and its strangeness.
The human voice itself is a central thread running through the season. As Black put it on the LBO website, the 2026-27 programming considers the voice at a time when its power feels particularly significant amid accelerating technology, the constant noise of the news, and everything else competing for our attention.
In January, the company will shift from the Queen Mary to First Congregational Church, 241 Cedar Ave., for “Tormento Seicento,” featuring soprano Amanda Forsythe with viola da gamba virtuoso Cristiano Contadin and his ensemble Opera Prima.
This Jan. 26 program will explore Baroque music by Claudio Monteverdi, Luigi Rossi, Tarquinio Merula and Barbara Strozzi, bringing audiences into the dazzling and improvisational world of the mid-18th century through historically informed performance.
Just a few days later, on Jan. 30, LBO will return to the Queen Mary for a recital curated by soprano Anna Schubert and Black.
The program has yet to be announced, but Anna Schubert is a familiar face and a beloved operatic voice in Southern California and beyond.
April will bring a reimagining of a canonical work, with Peter Brook’s “Impressions of Pelleas” from 1992, a condensed and powerful adaptation of Claude Debussy’s groundbreaking opera “Pelléas et Mélisande.”
Adapted by composer Marius Constant and legendary director Peter Brook, the work distills Debussy’s only opera into a dreamlike exploration of secrecy, desire, jealousy and fate. Black will direct the April 3 performance aboard the Queen Mary.
Then comes one of the season’s biggest productions: George Frideric Handel’s “Tolomeo” on May 1, presented in collaboration with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra.
Black’s staging of “Tolomeo” was presented by Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra in the Bay Area and New York this past summer, earning enthusiastic reviews and audience awards.Now, Long Beach audiences will get the chance to see the production aboard the Queen Mary.
LBO’s commitment to the creative process will become especially visible on May 16 with a free workshop of “The Passion of Nell” at UCLA’s Little Theater, in collaboration with the experimental music collective Wild Up and Opera UCLA.
Written by LBO Studio Artist Shelley Washington with a libretto by Lisa Teasley, this new opera tells the true story of Nell Theobald, a model whose obsession with soprano Birgit Nilsson ended in tragedy.
Rather than waiting until a new opera is polished and ready for its world premiere, LBO is inviting audiences to see the work in progress, featuring Wild Up alongside professional and student singers.
LBO’s 2026-27 season will conclude June 5 with Ana Sokolović’s “Svadba (Wedding),” a chamber opera performed entirely a cappella and sung by six female voices.
Directed by Sara E. Widzer and conducted by Christopher Rountree, the production will use original Serbian poetry and musical elements inspired by Balkan folklore, along with everyday objects and images, to tell the story of a bride preparing for her wedding.
There’s something deceptively simple about the premise — but Sokolović transforms a familiar ritual into a celebration of friendship, community, tradition and the enormous changes that accompany a major turning point.
It’s music that finds the extraordinary in the ordinary, a fitting conclusion to a season built around the idea that opera doesn’t have to stay inside the fanciful boundaries usually assigned to it.
By placing opera aboard a historic ship, in churches, at UCLA, and inside the development process itself, LBO is continuing its effort to make the art form more accessible without whittling away its ambition.
For more information, go to longbeachopera.org/2026-2027.
New Works Festival
After earlier installments in May and June, Long Beach Shakespeare Company’s 2026 New Works Festival will return for its final burst of performances from Friday to Sunday, Sept. 18-20, bringing a fresh slate of plays to the stage.
These works, which will be performed at the Helen Borgers Theatre, 4250 Atlantic Ave., will include a Shakespearean showdown, a harrowing story of survival and four short plays by emerging student playwrights.
The weekend will open with “Shav versus Whitmore” by Thomas M. Copeland and “The Ghosts of the Globe Theatre” by Arthur Allison, presented at 8 p.m. Friday and 4 p.m. Sunday.
In “Shav versus Whitmore,” the question is deceptively simple: can one man rewrite William Shakespeare?
The answer unfolds in a battle of pride, relevance and wit as two men face off in a single room.
“The Ghosts of the Globe Theatre,” meanwhile, takes a supernatural trip into Shakespearean history. Set around the infamous June 29, 1613, performance of “Henry VIII” — when the original Globe Theatre burned after a theatrical cannon reportedly set fire to its thatched roof — Allison’s play imagines what might happen when the ghosts of the Globe are forced to perform alongside the living players. Unfortunately for the spirits, the actors aren’t exactly helping matters.
Beneath the comic premise is a more poignant idea: if you had only five more minutes with the people you love, what would you say?
The festival will then present “Tucked Away” by Joni Ravenna at 8 p.m. Saturday and 1 p.m. Sunday.
The drama follows four very different young women being held captive on the top floor of an abandoned building as part of a human trafficking operation. With no electricity or running water and few obvious means of escape, the women must find a way to connect with one another if they hope to survive.
The weekend will also include the latest installment of the company’s Student New Works, showcasing four short plays from young writers.
Hannah Ko’s “With Meh Power Comes Some Responsibility” asks what happens when five D-list superheroes don’t make the cut; Zack Scrima’s “This Play Is About Bugs” puts a dung beetle and a mosquito at the center of a contemporary reimagining of an ancient fable; Mara Swanson’s “You Into Bad Girls” takes a comic turn, following a confident sister who pretends to be her shy sister at a bar in an attempt to impress a bartender; and Mateo Tomas Hercules Gonzalez’s “Triggerfish” features an Airbnb check-in that spirals into absurdism.
Together, these September performances will provide a nice final chapter for the Long Beach Shakespeare Company’s 2026 New Works Festival: a weekend that moves from Shakespearean ghosts and literary sparring to contemporary drama, a buggy fable, a vacation rental comedy and more.
For more information, go to lbshakespeare.org.
‘Night of the Living Dead’
The dead are rising at Long Beach Playhouse this fall, as George A. Romero and John Russo’s genre-defining “Night of the Living Dead” gets a theatrical reanimation.
Adapted for the stage by John Faust and directed by David Scaglione, the production will bring the landmark 1968 horror story into a live setting, where a group of strangers barricaded inside a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse must figure out how to survive an increasingly terrifying night.
As the undead gather outside, tensions inside the farmhouse become nearly as dangerous. With limited information, dwindling resources and nowhere to escape, the survivors turn on one another as quickly as they try to defend themselves from the creatures surrounding the house.
Romero’s original film used its horror premise to explore fear, social division and the ways people behave when familiar rules collapse.
This theatrical adaptation should do the same.
“Night of the Living Dead” will run from Saturday, Sept. 19, to Oct. 17 at Long Beach Playhouse’s Mainstage Theater. Performances will take place at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays, with a half-price preview on Friday and an opening-night champagne gala on Saturday.
For more information, go to lbplayhouse.org.