from “le détroit” · the strait
Detroit Opera launches its 2026-27 season with Puccini's Tosca at the Detroit Opera House on November 1, with soprano Masabane Rangwanasha in the title role and a staging that relocates the thriller to Fascist Italy of the 1930s.
Grand opera returns to downtown Detroit this fall. Detroit Opera raises the curtain on its 2026-27 season on Sunday, November 1, with Giacomo Puccini's Tosca inside the Detroit Opera House at 1526 Broadway Street.
Soprano Masabane Rangwanasha sings the title role, with Nathan Granner as the painter Cavaradossi and Alfred Walker as the police chief Scarpia. Dale Travis, James Kryshak and Lawson Anderson fill out the principal cast as the Sacristan, Spoletta and Angelotti. Music Director Roberto Kalb conducts the Detroit Opera Orchestra, Chorus and Youth Chorus.
The staging comes from director Louisa Proske, whose production first appeared at the 2025 Glimmerglass Festival and moves the opera's action to Fascist Italy of the 1930s. Proske has called the piece "a perfectly constructed political thriller, full of hair-raising suspense, with complex and dazzlingly extreme characters."
Three performances are on the calendar: a 2:30 p.m. matinee on Sunday, November 1, followed by 7:30 p.m. curtains on Thursday, November 5, and Saturday, November 7. The opening matinee is paired with an Opening Night Celebration, and the company is surrounding the run with companion programming it calls "Road to Tosca and Beyond: A Puccini Celebration." The opera itself runs two hours and 22 minutes with a single intermission.
The company is billing the year as a season-long exploration of faith, and it describes Tosca as "a work of passion, politics, and impossible choices" and "one of opera's most gripping thrillers."
Two more productions follow at the opera house. Fiddler on the Roof runs March 14 to 20, 2027, and Philip Glass's Satyagraha, with a libretto by Constance DeJong, plays on April 17, 2027. Satyagraha reworks Mahatma Gandhi's formative years in South Africa into a meditation on truth and resistance, with audiences viewing the action from the balcony.
Single tickets and subscriptions, the latter carrying savings of 17 to 30 percent, are available at detroitopera.org.
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