The soprano Michelle Bradley, making her Lyric debut, is indeed a charmer and a persuasive actress as a flippant celebrity who finds unexpected strength under pressure. This set-up takes up the first of the three acts, but the second two are much more about Tosca’s state of mind as she struggles to hold out against Scarpia’s cruel manipulations and rescue her lover. But Scarpia has an ulterior motive to seize Tosca for himself, and he’ll stop at nothing to destroy her. The brutal Baron Scarpia (Fabián Veloz), who is in charge of suppressing revolutionary activities, further incites Tosca’s suspicions, secretly assigning her a tail to observe where she goes to confront Mario, suspecting that the place Tosca believes Mario is meeting with a woman is actually where Angelotti is hiding. Mario’s girlfriend, the renowned singer Floria Tosca (Michelle Bradley) is not political and Mario does not want to endanger her by getting her involved, but she is unhappy that he is doing a rather poor job of hiding somebody and lying to her after painting such a flattering portrait of another woman.

There he meets a sympathetic painter, Mario Cavaradossi (Russell Thomas), who had been using Angelotti’s sister as a model and agrees to secretly help Angelotti escape. Angelotti (Rivers Hawkins), one of the leaders of the failed Roman revolution, takes refuge in a church where his sister has set up supplies for him. Unfortunately for our heroes, at the beginning of the play, their political future is very much in doubt. In the year 1800, its is still possible for the people of the oppressive Papal State to view Napoleon as a liberating force and eagerly await the return of the revolutionary armies. The production is not new, although it is new to Chicago, and under the steady hands of director Louisa Muller and conductor Eun Sun Kim, it does a solid, straight-forward job of telling the story of one of the stage’s greatest heroines, whose name, Floria Tosca, has become a synonym for drama itself.

It is also one of the shows the Lyric Opera of Chicago originally built its reputation on, so it’s a natural choice for the Lyric’s first post-pandemic season. Having premiered in 1900, it comes from the tail-end of opera’s classic age, and is one of the operas that most closely matches contemporary dramatic tastes.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Tosca is one of the world’s most performed and best-beloved operas.

Lyric opera tosca