Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | David Govertsen

Kevin Puts effectively shapes the time-traveling structure with distinctive sound worlds as thirty dramatic vignettes unfold across a little more than an hour and a half.

Setting the opera in the backyard of a suburban house feels refreshingly honest: the ridiculous and simplistic tale of the evil witch, the prince and the maiden is rightfully returned to the arena of children's games, and adults look on indulgently, with a wink.

The Chicago Opera Theater pairs two one-act operas from 1943 - Viktor Ullmann's The Emperor of Atlantis and Carl Orff's The Clever One - in a program conducted by Francesco Milioto and directed by Andreas Mitisek.

Chicago Lyric Opera's production of Madama Butterfly is open and airy, quiet in its theatrics, and the characters move with the grace and inevitability of shadows on the wall.