From Gilbert and Sullivan to Mad magazine’s mad Mort Drucker, not to mention the Marx Brothers in A Night At The Opera, no end of wiseacres have had their fun with Il Trovatore. Big joke! The plot hinges on a mother throwing the wrong child—her own—into a bonfire. But that’s backstory, and the consequences we witness add up to hypnotic high-Romantic melodrama. In this corner, meet the guerilla-poet Manrico, supposed son of the wild gypsy Azucena—and in that corner, the high-born Count di Luna. Deadly enemies as well as rivals in love, the two are also long-lost brothers, as the elder finds out seconds after having the younger’s head lopped off. Then the curtain falls like the blade of an ax. Houston Grand Opera opens the season promising a “stunning, old-meets-new-world experience.” Happily, this sounds like something the director Stephen Wadsworth actually has the historic background, intellectual discipline, and theatrical savvy to deliver. And he’s working with an incendiary cast of principals. The protean baritenor Michael Spyres leads as Manrico. Raehann Bryce-Davis stares into the campfire as the half-mad murderess who has raised the kidnapped child as her own. Lucas Meachem portrays the brother Manrico never recognizes as such, who by moonlight passes as his spitting image. The glamorous Ailyn Pérez, now at her peak, appears as Leonora, the court lady who can’t always tell the dudes apart. Patrick Summers conducts. —Matthew Gurewitsch