Susan Johnson Hanlon

The trick with operetta chestnuts like "Naughty Marietta" is selling the libretto to contemporary audiences. The music of Victor Herbert's 1910 masterpiece endures and is beloved, and a strong leading cast like the one employed by Skylark Opera can make it resonate compellingly.  

It took 68 years for Thornton Wilder's play, "Our Town," to become an opera.  

Every character betrays another in small or nation-shaking ways in the Guthrie's world premiere "After a Hundred Years." Does that make playwright Naomi Iizuka a deep-souled cynic? The very title of the play suggests that little of our lives will be remembered in a century — proclaiming either the futility of everything we do or the possibility of starting afresh after the most terrible memories fade.