Opera Saratoga’s 2025 summer
festival is a European adventure,
but year-round it keeps its tour closer to home with its critical children’s and Alzheimer’s programs around the Capital Region
SARATOGA SPRINGS – Opera Saratoga’s 2025 summer festival transports audiences on a first-class journey to some of opera’s greatest destinations. Lovers of travel and theater of all kinds — not just opera — will gravitate to this season’s works, most of which are showing at Universal Preservation Hall in June to more than 25,000 people.
It’s quite a feat for the historic 63-year-old opera — which was called Lake George Opera until 2011 — whose first production played to an audience of 230. To date, the company has performed more than 90 works and has bragging rights to the second-oldest singer training program in the country.
Now under the helm of General and Artistic Director Mary Birnbaum, an esteemed faculty member of The Juilliard School and in-demand director of both opera and musical theater, Opera Saratoga is better able to reach all lovers of the performing arts through a more varied program. This year’s Festival Artists will perform Jacques Offenbach’s La Vie parisienne, the musical She Loves Me, a new opera-theater work called A Mass for Women in Bathrooms, and an immersive experience called In a Grove that The New York Times called a “vividly immersive thriller!” in Spa State Park.
“From grand opera to musical theater to art song, this season will be diverse and inspiring,” Birnbaum says. “Singing is one of the most innately human acts, so we spend the year running programs that bring singers all over the Capital Region, providing music access to our most vulnerable population—seniors—and our most impressionable—kids.”
These two year-round programs are critical to the Capital Region. The opera’s education tour brings the joy of live theater to hundreds of the district’s students per showing, at a time when funding for arts education can be a struggle. And Songs by Heart is a life-changing program for memory care communities, delivering stress-reducing and therapeutic live music to those afflicted with dementia or Alzheimer’s.
