2025|26 Donor Dress Rehearsals

Lyric Opera of Chicago presents Medea, a tale of infidelity and revenge like no other. Euripides’s millennia-old tragedy comes to life — and gruesome death — in this presentation of acclaimed director Sir David McVicar’s iconic, grand-scale production.

This duo of passionate one-act operas explores the depths of spurned lovers’ grief and the lengths they’ll go to in avenging betrayal. Deadly love triangles unfold against starkly contrasted backdrops of an idyllic Sicilian countryside and a chaotic urban center.

Based on Oscar Wilde’s one-act play, Salome has been thrilling and fascinating audiences for more than a century. Lyric Opera of Chicago brings Sir David McVicar’s decadent production — which is set in 1940s fascist Italy and sheds a harsh light on the timeless greed and entitlement of the elite — to Chicago.

Two officers, convinced all women are fickle in love, hatch a plan to switch places and woo each other’s fiancées in disguise — but the women know exactly what they’re up to from the start. Hilarity and dazzling arias ensue in a 1930s-era seaside country club, where frothy costumes and splashy sets belie an undercurrent of distrust and deception on par with a binge-worthy reality show.

Meet Cio-Cio-San — known as Madama Butterfly — a faithful but doomed geisha in love with B.F. Pinkerton. Everyone but Butterfly knows the Navy lieutenant will break her heart and ruin her life. Opera fans will thrill at this beautiful, thoughtful production from Lyric Opera’s own Matthew Ozawa that brings new dimension to an age-old story.

On the Day of the Dead, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo crosses over from the underworld for 24 short hours with Diego Rivera, who remains in the living world, alone and grieving her loss. Lyric Opera of Chicago brings the legendary marriage — and revolutionary art — of Frida and Diego to the stage with vivid colors, surrealist touches, and lush, evocative music sung in Spanish and inspired by Mexican folk music traditions.