Over the past decade, Lyric Opera of Chicago has been quietly rebranding itself. The company hasn’t gone so far as to change its legal name, but instead of using its full title, it now goes more succinctly by “Lyric” on much of its public-facing messaging, like its market­ing materials, press releases, and social media posts.

Lyric’s branding tweak parallels a sub­tle shift in the company’s programming — a calculated broadening of what the company considers to be operatic performance to include various kinds of storytelling through the human voice. While Lyric still produces multiple mainstage operas, it also puts on a vari­ety of other performances, which have recently included Broadway musicals like West Side Story and Guys and Dolls, live-with-film concerts, and an operatic rock concert featuring Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins.

So, is this truly a paradigm shift? No, says John Mangum, the company’s general director, president, and CEO. Lyric’s aim is to widen its audience and increase its revenues through “opera-adjacent” programming, he says, with the ultimate goal of benefitting its oper­atic offerings, which are facing sharply rising costs just like at other companies around the country.

While creating new product lines can be a daunting task at any company, Lyric needed to earn more cash, and expand­ing its definition of what an opera company can and should produce has increased its ticket revenue substan­tially. “I think any time opportunities like Billy Corgan come along, it behooves us all as opera companies to explore and not shy away,” Mangum says, noting that the robust box office receipts from programming like the Corgan collaboration have allowed Lyric to increase its operatic offerings.

Lyric isn’t alone in thinking creatively about its mission and programming to increase revenue. Opera Columbus, too, has diversified its artistic product lines, offering immersive productions of La traviata and The Magic Flute — the latter staged at a “secret” location revealed shortly before performances — as well as a production of West Side Story in collaboration with the city’s symphony and ballet. This fall, it will present Pirates! The Penzance Musical, a Broad­way-style adaptation of the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta The Pirates of Penzance created by Roundabout Theatre Company in New York City. And, overseas, Austria’s Bregenz Festival provides a compelling example of outside-the-box thinking at the intersection of art and revenue: The company funds roughly 75% of its sea­son through ticket sales from a single large-scale operatic production while upending conventional notions of how opera is produced.

Lyric's New Revenue Streams

In November 2025, Lyric Opera of Chicago welcomed hometown hero Billy Corgan, leader of the rock band Smash­ing Pumpkins, to its downtown stage for a seven-performance run. The concerts featured Corgan singing songs from the band’s 1995 alt-rock classic album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, at the front of the stage with four opera singers and the might of the opera’s orchestra and chorus behind him. Lyric also added digital projections that gave a rock concert aesthetic. “It was conceived in a sort of oratorio-operatic style, so it didn’t feel like an artistic deviation from what we normally do,” Mangum says.

But it is a deviation from a traditional definition of opera. And it worked. The performances brought in about $3.9 mil­lion on relatively low expenses of $1.3 million — Corgan donated his fees — netting a $2.66 million profit. A fully staged opera at Lyric, meanwhile, can bring in around $2 million, but it has much larger expenses of $3 million, leaving the company with a net loss, according to figures the opera com­pany presented at OPERA America’s Trustee Forum in March.

Positive revenue is the guiding principle behind Lyric’s new product lines, not only helping to offset the losses of the operas, but allowing the company to produce more opera as well. In the 2026–2027 season, Lyric will present seven operas instead of six, with the caveat that the seventh is in a concert format, and therefore cheaper to produce.

Mellon Collie was the company’s top net revenue generator last sea­son, but its other programming streams are also net positive. Lyric’s musical theater offerings, which bring opera-level voices and production qual­ity to Broadway shows, net $1.3 million on average after expenses, thanks in part to a specially negotiated deal with the musicians' union that allows the com­pany to contract its orchestra at a lower rate than it does for operas. Its live-with-film performances have slimmer margins; the October 2025 performances of Coco netted about $46,000.

Pirates! Heads to Columbus

In New York City, the Roundabout Theatre Company — the largest non­profit theater in the country — was also thinking about younger audiences as it developed a new production of the oper­etta Pirates of Penzance. Scott Ellis, the show’s director and a longtime artistic leader at Roundabout, says the team was guided by questions like “How do we introduce this show to a younger gener­ation who didn’t grow up with Gilbert & Sullivan?” They hit upon the idea to set the work in New Orleans with the score reflecting the “sound of jazz.”

Rupert Holmes updated the book and lyrics into a more modern vernacular, and Joseph Joubert and Daryl Waters reworked the score for a small jazz orchestra. The end result was Pirates! The Penzance Musical. A cast album was quickly created to get the new ver­sion into the public, and the production leaned into celebrity as well, starring David Hyde Pierce of the sitcom Frasier fame as the Major-General and drag per­former Jinkx Monsoon as Ruth, both of whom were box office draws.

Roundabout extended the show’s run twice, with sellout or near sellout crowds attending every show, outperforming all other shows the company had produced in that space. Pirates! ran for 15 weeks and 109 performances, closing only because the theater was set to undergo renovations, and took in more than $6.5 million in ticket sales.

When the creators made Pirates! available for licensing, Opera Colum­bus snapped up the rights almost immediately for a November run. The company’s general director and CEO, Julia Noulin-Mérat, says she sought to produce the show — which strays away from traditional operetta toward a more Broadway-style production — because she wanted to build on her 2025 pro­duction of West Side Story, which was a cross-Columbus collaboration that included BalletMet, the Columbus Symphony, and other theater companies.

“For us, West Side Story was such a box-office-hit turning point. In four performances, we did the equivalent box office of 17 Nutcracker performances,” Noulin-Mérat says, adding that Pirates! offers “a wealth of possibilities” for sim­ilar collaborations. “We can bring in our friends from the jazz orchestra. It has a musical theater component. It has beautiful singing. The other thing that really excited me, too, is I felt the role of Ruth was more fleshed out.” (The com­pany has since engaged drag queen and Columbus resident Nina West to play Ruth in the production.)

Noulin-Mérat emphasizes that Opera Columbus’ success with musical the­ater does not mean that the company is diverting from its primary mission. “We’re definitely a house of opera,” she says. “Our specialty, and what we excel at, is opera.” But, like in Chicago, the defi­nition of opera is expanding to include works such as Broadway-style operetta. And, if Roundabout’s box office success is any indicator, this will only benefit the company’s bottom line and its capacity to produce traditional operas as well.

Bregenz's Business Model

Like other opera companies and fes­tivals, the Bregenz Festival in scenic Austria produces well-known titles like La traviata and Carmen as well as more experimental, cutting edge work, but its business model is completely different: The July-to-August festival earns about 75% of its annual $29.1 million budget from performances of a single operatic production, with the remainder made up of local and national government funding (20%) and donations (5%), according to festival data.

That’s a staggering statistic and a lot of pressure on that production, which takes place on a specially constructed lake stage that plays to an amphitheater of 6,800 on the shore. If that production misses its goal, the entire festival would suffer financially, so Bregenz takes numerous steps to set the show up for box office success. The lakeshore produc­tions run for 28 performances a summer for two summers and need to sell 186,000 tickets each year. With so many tickets at stake, “we cannot take risks,” says Lilli Paasikivi, the festival’s current artistic director and a mezzo-soprano.

Most years, the main production sells out completely. How does it ensure these productions are box office hits? First, it only programs operas that are already proven box office draws, like Madama Butterfly and Rigoletto. “For us, it is really important that people rec­ognize the composer and recognize the title,” Paasikivi says. But the company also adapts the operas significantly, shortening the runtimes to two hours with no intermission, an idea that is still anathema in some traditional opera houses. “We have no interval, because you couldn’t take 6,800 people out for a drink,” Paasikivi jokes.

There are other key differences to tra­ditional grand opera. For example, while the operas are staged in their original languages with supertitles in English and German, the singers are amplified with special positional microphones. The orchestra and chorus perform indoors and are broadcast from speakers at the theater, while a live and unamplified chorus acts on the lake stage. No single cast could sing the entire run, so Bregenz triple casts its main roles and double casts its secondary roles.

Planning takes around four years — this summer’s debut of La traviata was announced back in 2023 — and the festi­val publicizes the concept and design and set-building process to stir up interest, maintaining a live webcam feed during the construction phase. Building the sets on the lake, which are intended to com­plement the area’s natural beauty and are a large part of the draw, is expensive. The cost to build the set for this year’s La traviata — a new custom production set in the Roaring Twenties — was $13.9 mil­lion, but the festival reaps a high reward for such spending, and it amortizes that cost over two summers instead of just one.

All 186,000 tickets to this year’s La traviata, which range from $35 to more than $400, had sold out by April. “The box office of the lakeshore produc­tions is the backbone of our operations,” says Paasikivi. “The box office also pays for all the other activity that we do. We say in Deutsch, ‘Kunst finanziert Kunst’: The art is financing the art.”

Outside of this main production, the festival also offers symphonic, choral, vocal, and chamber music concerts, as well as theater and more opera, including a pair of world premieres, all made possible by the robust receipts of the waterborne shows. “I like the idea of having a really popular title by the lake, and then to do things like, last year, Oedipe, which was top, top quality,” Paasikivi says. “It makes it possible that we can have a really interesting festival and also take some risks on other stages.”

Pushing the boundaries of opera is not without risk, in and of itself — there was no guarantee that longstanding patrons would support these new kinds of performances, and it takes significant resources to start a new series. How­ever, by focusing on new programming that is likely to be revenue-positive, the Bregenz Festival, Opera Columbus, and Lyric have not lost support overall, and the companies stand firmly behind the performances’ artistic merit.

As expenses rise, adding performances like these could become a necessary evolution that will help the art form continue to exist in all of its guises, including these companies’ produc­tions of more traditional opera. After all, “We have more overall performances, thanks to Guys and Dolls and the movies and the concerts,” Lyric’s Mangum con­cludes. “The idea of all that, though, is to make sure that the number of opera performances that we’re giving is also increasing.”

Additional reporting by Gregory Stepanich, a reporter and editor who has written for the Miami Herald, Opera News, Opera, and more.