In Review: ONE Festival (National Sawdust Log)


Opera Omaha’s ONE Festival, co-directed by the company’s general director, Roger Weitz, and director James Darrah, is a multidisciplinary two-week series that presents opera, installation, dance, exhibitions, and social gatherings designed to embrace Omaha’s creative community. The multi-venue festival also offers a generously supported platform for the next generation of creators, reflecting the company’s notable commitment to the breadth of operatic representation and audience growth. The festival is impressively international in scope, with creators and performers represented from across the globe, and extraordinarily well resourced.

In this second iteration, two new productions occupied the central focus. A newly edited version of Gounod’s Faust, conducted by Steven White with Lileana Blain-Cruz in the director’s chair, enjoyed a two-performance run at the sumptuous Orpheum Theater. And Philip Glass’s dance opera Les Enfants Terribles, directed by Darrah with choreography by Gustavo Ramirez Sansano, had a five-performance engagement at an industrially inclined work-arts space, the Mastercraft Building.