HGO's new season

Houston Grand Opera shines a light on classic works for 2025-26 season

Classic works and contemporary stories highlight Houston Grand Opera’s 2025-2026 season. The theme of the season is The Light We Hold.

“We chose the theme of HGO’s 2025-26 season — the light we hold — not only to honor the light we hold for our art form, and the great composers and storytellers through the centuries, but for all the artists and creatives who bring light into our world,” HGO general director and CEO Khori Dastoor said in a statement.

The season opens with the George Gershwin American classic, Porgy and Bess, running from October 24 to November 7. Bass-baritone Michael Sumuel and soprano Angel Blue lead the company as the title characters in this story set in the Jim Crow South. It follows disabled beggar Porgy and Bess, a woman struggling with addiction, as they fall in love. James Gaffigan conducts. The production is from Washington National Opera and directed by Francesco Zambello. HGO first presented the opera 50 years ago in a landmark production that went on to Broadway and earned HGO both a Tony and a Grammy. Select tickets to the opera are on sale now.

From October 30 to November 4 is Puccini’s Il Trittico, the company’s first-ever full presentation of the opera, a triptych of one-act operas. Il tabarro is the tragic tale of a barge captain, his young wife, and her lover, set on the Seine. Also part of the production are Suor Angelica, about a nun with a haunted past, and Gianni Schicchi, the tale of a cunning conman who turns a family’s greed into a delightful farce. Houston favorites mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, and tenor Arturo Chacón-Cruz all appear in the production. Patrick Summers, HGO’s artistic and music director, who will step down in May, 2026, conducts.

Kevin Puts and librettist Mark Campbell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2011 opera Silent Night, inspired by the 2005 film Joyeux Noël opens the new year, running January 23 to February 28, 2026. It tells the real-life story of a Christmas truce of 1914 during World War I, when one soldier’s defiant caroling sparks a ceasefire. James Robinson directs this trilingual production with a lead cast that includes tenor Duke Kim as German opera singer/soldier Nikolaus Sprink with soprano Sylvia D’Eramo as his diva lover, Anna Sørensen, joined by bass-baritone Ryan McKinny, baritone Iurii Samoilov, and baritone Thomas Glass as the story’s three lieutenants. Dynamic young conductor Kensho Watanabe makes his company debut at the podium.

From January 30 to February 15, 2026, Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel returns to the HGO stage. Adapted from the Brothers Grimm tale of two children who encounter an enchanted candy cottage in the woods, it features a whimsical score full of German nursery songs that was created in association with London’s Royal Ballet and Opera and San Francisco Opera. The opera stars mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke as Hansel and soprano Mané Galoyan as Gretel leading a stellar cast. Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton makes a star turn as the Witch. Andreas Ottensamer, artistic director of the Bürgenstock Festival in Switzerland, makes his HGO debut as conductor.

Director Robert Wilson’s mesmerizing vision of the beloved Messiah, composed by Handel and arranged by Mozart, is on stage from April 17 to May 3, 2026. It’s the first time this production will be seen in the United States. A meditation on Jesus’s role as the Christian messiah, originally conceived for concert halls, the show will be transformed into a theatrical spectacle reminiscent of Disney’s Fantasia. Patrick Summers conducts.

The season closes with a fan favorite, Rossini’s uproarious masterpiece The Barber of Seville, onstage from April 24 to May 10, 2026. A co-production of the Canadian Opera Company, Opéra National de Bordeaux, and Opera Australia, this delightful staging is the creation of director Joan Font, returning to Houston following the triumph of his acclaimed Cinderella. Baritone Will Liverman makes his HGO debut as the charming barber Figaro, tenor Jack Swanson is Count Almaviva, and mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack makes her company debut as the mysterious beauty Rosina. Gemma New, principal conductor of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, makes her company debut at the podium.

In addition to the mainstage season, the company presents a series of additional programming. HGO’s annual Concert of Arias, the live final round of the Eleanor McCollum Competition for Young Singers, is on February 6, 2026. A small group of talented emerging artists performs, accompanied by the renowned HGO Orchestra.

February 14, 2026 is the second annual Family Day, where the opera company will present a 90-minute, English-language, relaxed-environment performance of Hansel and Gretel.

The acclaimed Butler Studio for Young Artists presents a fully staged production of composer Carlisle Floyd’s Of Mice and Menon March 13 and 15, 2026. It’s based on the classic novel by John Steinbeck and the production celebrates the centennial of the composer’s birth.

HGO offers a variety of ticket offerings, from flexible three-opera packages to the full six-opera season, with full subscriptions starting at $90. Subscriptions are now available at HGO.org. Single tickets to the November 9, 11, 13, and 15 performances of Porgy and Bess are also available now.

Photo by KarliCadel, courtesy Houston Grand Opera

Gershwin's classic American opera Porgy and Bess is part of Houston Grand Opera's 2025-2026 season.

mazel tov

Houston film festival spotlights Jewish experiences around the world

Two women sitting on a diving board holding a life preserver saying Sha-wan-ha Lodge

Photo courtesy Gary Dan and the Dan Family

The Catskills is part of the 2025 Houston Jewish Film Festival and tells the story of the popular vacation spot's heyday and decline.

Back for its 21st year, the 2025 Houston Jewish Film Festival offers movie buffs two weeks of new and classic Jewish and Israeli documentaries, features, shorts, and family fare.

Photo courtesy Gary Dan and the Dan Family

The Catskills is part of the 2025 Houston Jewish Film Festival and tells the story of the popular vacation spot's heyday and decline.

Events and screenings are hosted at the Evelyn R. Rubenstein Jewish Community Center, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Holocaust Museum Houston between this Saturday, March 22 and Saturday, April 5. Tickets are available for individual films, or via a Houston Jewish Film Festival subscription that offers access to every film in the series.

“We look for a really good variety that will appeal to many different segments of the community,” Matt Stein, chair of the festival, tells CultureMap. “One of the things that we really look for is to bring films to the audience that show the incredible diversity of Jewish life and culture around the whole planet.”

Stein notes that many people think of the Jewish experience as being either that of those living in the Middle East or of those of Ashkenazi descent. While some films in the festival definitely feature those backgrounds and experiences, the films the committee has selected also offer a broader range of subject matter.

The Blond Boy from the Casbah, showing on Sunday, March 23, for example, focuses on a boy living in Algiers with his Sephardic family, right before the country makes its claim for independence.

“[It shows how] the Jewish community was intimately intertwined with this chapter of French history, when France was a colonial power in Algeria and what that looked like,” says Stein. “There was a thriving Jewish community in Algiers and other cities in Algeria for much of the 20th century and before. And not only was it thriving, but it was peacefully coexisting with Muslim neighbors and Christian neighbors.”

Filmgoers can also expect selections such as the beloved 1986 Steven Spielberg animated film, An American Tail, which follows Russian mouse Fievel Mousekewitz and his family on their journey to America in 1885; the 1986 romantic comedy Crossing Delancey, starring Amy Irving as Izzy Grossman, a bookstore worker whose bubbe and a matchmaker are cooking up plans to get her wed; October H8te, a 2024 documentary exploring the eruption of antisemitism on college campuses across the U.S. following the events of October 7; and All About the Levkoviches, a 2024 dramedy about a Hungarian boxing trainer reuniting with his estranged son.

The Catskills, a documentary directed by Lex Gillespie, spotlights the heyday and decline of the resorts and bungalows that gave rise to “Borscht Belt” comedians and were a part of the fabric of mid-century Jewish-American life.

“The Catskills sort of looms large as this place that [Jews could go] before Jews were welcome to go to country clubs and other places,” says Stein. “So it's sort of embedded in an older generation of Jews. We know that it's nostalgic for [people], either for themselves or they know that growing up their parents did this.”

Stein and his committee are all volunteers. They work with a few staff members from the JCC to curate the festival by spending hours throughout the year screening movies and discussing what makes a good fit for the festival. This year, the group decided to also include several short films. Some will play ahead of feature films, but four films will be shown together at An Evening of Shorts on March 30.

“I just think it's a wonderful medium and Americans aren't used to watching five minute films or 20 minute films,” Stein says, pointing out that he hopes audiences will think differently about how short films can encapsulate stories.

Storytelling is at the heart of the films selected for the festival, and Stein thinks festival goers will have great choices to fit a variety of tastes.

movies jewish community center 2025 houston jewish film festival