Chris Ruel

At the Princeton Festival’s June 12 “Madama Butterfly” staged at Morven—the former governor’s mansion in Princeton, New Jersey—the Cio-Cio-San the audience watched was not the Cio-Cio-San it heard. The headliner, Toni Marie Palmertree, sidelined by a vocal infection, acted the role onstage while Brenna Markey sang it amplified from behind the set through speakers. Ironically, the staging presented two stories at once: the one written by Puccini and an allegory of today’s America.

I’ve seen “La Bohème” many times, which means I usually know within a few minutes how it’s going to go. Puccini doesn’t ask for permission to rip your heart out; an unrelenting sense of tragedy is the hallmark of his work. At some point, the opera either grabs you, or it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, you sit there thinking, okay… why isn’t this hitting me? Put another way: why am I not crying?

Photo: Wide Eyed Studios On February 26, 2026, Curtis Opera Theatre presented something that was… unique. Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (1952–2023) deliberately stripped away the familiar scaffolding of opera—no heroes, no villains, no tidy narrative arc—and replaced it with something closer to performance art with a score. Sung in French with English supertitles, “La Passion de Simone” is a 75-minute, no-intermission work that left me genuinely perplexed. In the best way.