Ever since its premiere at London’s Savoy Theatre in 1885, The Mikado, a farce set in a daffy fantasy Japan called Titipu, has routinely been performed in yellowface, a practice increasingly untenable in any enlightened metropolis. Yet, demand for this ninth of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operettas—with hits like “A wand’ring minstrel I,” “Three little maids from school,” and so many more—shows no sign of waning. What to do? READ ON

Bad guys have always been good for opera. They betray friends, doom lovers, and disrupt the peace—mayhem that leads to melodrama and drives a juicy plot. Composer Gregory Spears’s Fellow Travelers, set in early-1950s Washington, D.C., deploys one of the baddest guys of all, Senator Joe McCarthy, but he appears only briefly. “Opera is a very complex system, involving a lot of resources,” says Spears. “I don’t think we need to waste the resources of the orchestra telling people that McCarthy was a villain. I’m interested in complicated characters we can get close to—and I don’t want to get very close to him.” READ ON