Unless you’re family, you’ll never have heard of the principals in this summertime Tosca, and that is precisely the point. Wolf Trap Opera is a springboard for stars of tomorrow. Take Ryan McKinny, heard at the Filene Center years ago as the Tutor in Rossini’s singing-nunsense Le Comte Ory and the eponymous bridegroom of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro. Since then, he has proved his prowess as a major-league singing actor many times over—notably as Wagner’s Amfortas, the tormented king who can’t die, at Wagner’s own Bayreuth Festival, and as Jake Heggie’s walking dead man Joseph DeRocher at the Met, Chicago Lyric, and San Francisco Opera. Next season, in the Met’s premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s phantasmagoric Lincoln in the Bardo, McKinny tackles Michael Vollmann, a principal narrator in the original George Saunders novel, undead, naked, in a perpetual state of grotesque arousal. Between onstage gigs, though, McKinny has also developed a thriving side-hustle as an innovative, operatically oriented filmmaker and director. And this summer, you’ll find him—alongside his wife and filmmaking partner Tonya McKinny—back in Vienna, Virginia, putting Tessa McQueen, Demetrious Sampson Jr., and Jonathan Patton through their paces as the diva with Rome at her feet, the artist-revolutionary who is the sugar in her cappuccino, and the chief of the secret police out to destroy them. Theirs is a high-tension fandango. Between cutlery, gunshots, and a climactic leap from a Roman monument, none of the characters survives. But as audiences wend their way home, odds are they’ll be memorizing names for bragging rights a few seasons hence. —Matthew Gurewitsch