Fans of Woman in Gold, get this. “Gerald McDonald was sick with Hepatitis C, awaiting a liver transplant and low on cash,” the Chicago Tribune reported on October 17, 2002. “Living alone in a tiny frame house in Lyons, just south of Chicago, he was playing out his last days watching cable TV and listening to heavy metal records, another decorated Vietnam vet squeaking by on disability checks. But when he learned that he was heir to a multimillion-dollar art collection looted by the Nazis in Prague—and that the Czech government was going to take it from him before he even laid eyes on it—he figured he couldn’t sit around the house anymore.” Find out what happened next in Before It All Goes Dark, a new opera by the wildly prolific, and lately wildly successful Jake Heggie and his frequent collaborator Gene Scheer. (Next season at the Met, you’ll be cheering the New York premiere of their now classic Moby-Dick). Ryan McKinny, whose credits include Amfortas, mortally wounded king of the knights of the Holy Grail, in Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival, stars as Mac. When the real Mac’s story was first breaking two decades ago, the Trib wrote, “he has never shrunk from a fight and has more than 20 broken bones to prove it.” —Matthew Gurewitsch