"I don't think I can bring my niece anymore."
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A few years ago, one of our board members came to see La traviata — one of Verdi’s most ravishing, heartbreaking operas. She loved it. She was moved. And then, on her way out, she pulled aside a staff member and said something that has stuck with us ever since.
“I’m not going to be able to bring my niece anymore if the woman is always going to die.”
We laughed. A little. And then we thought about it.
Because she wasn’t wrong.
Here’s the sequence, since OperaDelaware mounted La traviata in the spring of 2023:
La traviata (spring 2023): Violetta dies of consumption. Rigoletto (fall 2023): Gilda sacrifices herself to save a man who doesn’t deserve it. Turandot (spring 2024): Liù takes her own life rather than betray the man she loves. La bohème (fall 2024): Mimì dies of consumption. Fearless (spring 2025): A world premiere about the life (and death) of WWII Women Airforce Service Pilot Hazel Ying Lee. Tosca (fall 2025): Tosca jumps off a building. Andrea Chénier (spring 2026, coming this May): The tenor goes to the guillotine. Maddalena (choosing love over survival) goes with him.
Six-and-a-half years. Eight productions. And with the exception of Fearless, which grapples with real historical loss, every single leading woman either dies, sacrifices herself, or chooses death as her most dramatic available option.
We love these operas. We will keep programming them. The music is extraordinary and the drama is real and that is not changing.
But our board member wasn’t making a critical argument. She was making a personal one. She wanted to share something she loved with someone she loved. And she wasn’t sure the thing she loved would be welcoming to a new audience member who might reasonably look at the pattern and feel like opera wasn’t built for her.
That is the reason this concert exists.
Stayin’ Alive: A Night at the Opera Where Nobody Dies started as a bit of a joke. And then we started pulling the repertoire and realized: there is so much music. So much gorgeous, alive, joyful, complicated, aching music that exists in opera and musical theatre where the characters make it to the final bar.
We organized it into four sets, because we think survival itself has a kind of arc.
Survival by Wit — the Beaumarchais characters: Figaro, Rosina, Cherubino, Susanna. They’ve been outsmarting everyone around them across centuries. They outlive kings. They outlive revolutions. Wit, it turns out, is a remarkably durable survival strategy.
Survival by Pleasure — operetta, party pieces, and the songs that exist purely to celebrate being alive. The good wine. The good company. The decision to stay at the party.
Survival by Song — the American songbook tradition and its heirs. Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Adam Guettel (who is, not incidentally, Oscar Hammerstein’s grandson). Music that believes a song can carry you somewhere your own feet can’t reach. There is also, for reasons that felt right, a tap number.
Survival by Purpose — Sondheim. Who was more interested in what happens after you believe that love or courage will carry you through. When the dream gets complicated. When staying alive means deciding again, and again what you’re actually living for.
The evening closes with “Make Our Garden Grow,” from Bernstein’s Candide. Which is, in our view, one of the most quietly devastating arguments for community ever set to music. Nobody in it is fine. Everything has gone wrong. And the answer they arrive at is: tend the garden. Stay. Do the work. Together.
Company Artists Emily Margevich, Dane Suarez, and Gerard Moon are joined by mezzo-soprano Gina Perregrino and pianist Husan Chun-Novak. The program is an evening of survival stories — not because nobody suffers, but because everyone chooses to keep going.
If you’ve been looking for a way in, this is it. If you’ve been a believer for years, this is a reminder of why.
And if you have a niece — or a nephew, or a friend, or a skeptical partner, or a neighbor who’s always said they want to try opera but never quite gotten there — bring them Thursday night or Sunday afternoon. We built this one with them in mind.
Stayin’ Alive: A Night at the Opera Where Nobody Dies March 27 at 7:30 PM · March 29 at 2:00 PM OperaDelaware Studios in Wilmington!
Tickets are on sale now for Stayin' Alive, part of the OperaDelaware Studio Series programmed by our company artists: sopranos Emily Margevich and Toni Marie Palmertree, tenor Dane Suarez, and baritone Gerard Moon. And coming this May, we bring you the company premiere of Giordano's French Revolution masterpiece Andrea Chénier presented at the OPERA America Conference hosted by OperaDelaware in Wilmington.
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