Once again, local residents and visitors from afar will have an opportunity to experience grand (and not so grand) opera in an historically significant, elegant performance space.

Recognizing its significance, The Colorado Music Hall of Fame will honor the organization as it inducts the company on opening night, June 29. Also during this ceremony singers Cynthia Lawrence and Keith Miller will be recognized, along with the Opera’s late conductor, John Moriarty.

Opening night’s opera will be a new staging of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, a treat for music lovers, comedy lovers, and word players alike.

The “grand” opera presented this season will be, most appropriately, Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West (La fanciulla del West in the original Italian). Fairly rarely performed these days, this opera is of particular significance to the community because it is set in a fictional western town of the same period as Central City’s and Black Hawk’s Gold Rush origins. Central City Opera’s President and CEO, Scott Finlay, has said “Where else can you go to watch a show that is about gold miners in an opera house that was built during the Gold Rush?”

The third opera of the season is Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, with a libretto by Langston Hughes and Elmer Rice. Written in 1947, Street Scene has been described as “part traditional opera, part Broadway spectacle.” Those who are more familiar with Weill’s collaborations with fellow German refugee Bertolt Brecht, like Threepenny Opera, are probably aware of the particular haunting harmonies of his music.

Along with the operas, the company is presenting several special performances, lectures, and other treats for its audiences.

Central City Opera’s 2024 season runs from June 29-August 4. For tickets and information: 303-292-6700 or centralcityopera.org.