Performer: Schyler Vargas

Carlisle Floyd's operatic setting of John Steinbeck’s classic novella is given a new production in the composer's centenary year at the Lyric Opera of Kansas City.

Mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught anchors a fluid and appealingly staged new production of Kevin Puts' penny dreadful.

Glimmerglass Opera Festival’s production of Candide leans heavily on a dry comedic sensibility, which most of the cast execute admirably.

Francesca Zambello sets the whole opera as a flashback, showing, during the prelude, the heroine surrounded by doctors and nurses in a sanatorium for patients dying from tuberculosis.