In 1885, the Pittsburgh Dispatch ran a column under this heading “What Girls Are Good For,” proposing two answers: birthing babies and keeping house. “Lonely Orphan Girl,” a reader barely into her 20s, sent in a blistering rejoinder, and with that, a star was born. The writer behind the pseudonym was Elizabeth Jane Cochran, but her editor gave her the nom de plume Nellie Bly, borrowed from a song by Stephen Foster (whose “Nelly,” unlike Cochran, was Black). The intrepid reporter traveled around the world in 72 days, handily beating Jules Verne’s fictional Phineas Fogg by a staggering eight days. More impressive than that, she got herself committed to a mental asylum to expose the conditions within. That’s the chapter of her life Rene Orth’s new opera focuses on. The daredevil soprano Kiera Duffy, who set the Philadelphia stage on fire in Breaking the Waves, plays Nellie. —Matthew Gurewitsch