How North Carolina Opera Is Beating the Odds

For about three hours on the night of January 30, Raleigh Memorial Auditorium transformed into Nagasaki at the dawn of the 20th century. Singing Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Caitlin Gotimer watched the harbor for a certain ship, her hope suspended like the cherry blossoms raining down on the stage. But the audience knew the ship would only bring ruin. 

The moment when Cio-Cio-San’s dream dies is one of the most devastating in opera, and this was a polished production helmed by Francesca Zambello, the artistic director of Washington National Opera. But great operas struggle to find audiences all the time. So none of this fully accounts for North Carolina Opera’s recent success.

NC Opera is one of about 119 professional opera companies in the U.S., according to Opera America’s 2025 field report, which was based on surveys of thousands of operagoers and data from hundreds of professionals. And it seems to be markedly outpacing the industry’s recovery since COVID-19. Nationally, houses are typically filling half to three-quarters of seats, and ticket sales still generate less revenue than before the pandemic.

But NC Opera’s Madama Butterfly was a full sell-out—and the best-selling show in the nonprofit opera company’s 16-year history. It was on track to be its most profitable until one show got snowed out. More important for a sustainable future, the subscriber base has doubled since the 2019–20 season.

“You talk to people around the country in the performing arts, and they’ll say, ‘The subscription model is dead.’ We haven’t found that to be the case,” said Eric Mitchko, who has been the company’s general director since 2010, when the Opera Company of North Carolina and Capital Opera Raleigh merged to form NC Opera.

The COVID-19 shutdown ravaged all the performing arts, but opera had some unique vulnerabilities. Here was an art form defined by unamplified singers expelling prodigious breath in close proximity—a 400-year-old, distinctly European art form whose relatability to modern Americans was already up for debate.

When the country reopened, opera companies found out which patrons had been habitual and which cared enough to return. They also got a small but significant influx of first-time visitors and new subscribers. The question was whether the newcomers were just giving opera a whirl, like theatrical sourdough, or could be convinced to stick around.

The Opera America field report points to several encouraging signs nationally: More than 2 million Americans attend the opera each year, and the field employs about 45,000 people. Ticket revenue per seat has almost rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. But attendance has yet to fully recover, the overall number of performances has shrunk, and inflation keeps increasing pressure on philanthropic donations, which most operas heavily rely on to survive.

Mitchko has a straightforward mindset about the company’s success. 

“It’s a matter of doing things that people want to see, right?” he said. “New audiences like the same things old audiences do—the inherited repertoire. It’s theater with really great music, and people like that. It’s a great night out in public to see a show.”

But the question remains: In content-rich 2026, what compels more than 2,000 people to spend a Friday night immersed in the tragic tale of a young Japanese geisha betrayed by an American naval officer, sung in Italian with English supertitles—and what keeps them coming back?

The relevance of opera was in the news recently after the actor Timothée Chalamet, during a spate of almost impressive insufferableness, proclaimed that no one cared about it anymore. Sheer numbers prove him wrong. But the challenges that modernity poses to opera shouldn’t be underestimated.

Opera can’t do quantity and speed. As NC Opera Director of Marketing Angela Grant pointed out, the difference between a three-show season and a four-show season can be hundreds of thousands of dollars. The subscription model clashes with self-curated times, and the expense of each production makes offering the flexibility that consumers want a gamble.

The Opera America study focused in particular on that small but prized slice of opera newcomers, the majority of whom discovered opera through videos and recordings rather than the traditional route of growing up in a family that attended. But the live acoustic properties of opera are intrinsic to its power. You can chop it up on Reels, but as Will Durant said of philosophy, when dismembered, it loses its beauty and joy.

Grant joined NC Opera’s small team as its marketing director when the pandemic rebound began in 2021. 

“I think opera hasn’t, in the past, been as ingrained in our community as it is in bigger cities,” she said. “Having grown up here, I knew that there was opera, but I didn’t think of it as something for me to do.”

Opera did used to seem abstract and remote—something you knew from Bugs Bunny cartoons and jokes about fat ladies singing. But the Triangle has evolved culturally, with the influx of people from major metropolises widening local opera’s potential audience. And musical theater, from Glee to Wicked to Hamilton, has been resurgent in 21st-century pop culture, peeling a layer of strangeness from the idea of stories in song.

The Opera America study found that new audiences are primarily seeking big experiences woven into a broader social fabric—the centerpiece of a night out. They prefer works they’ve heard of, but this means contemporary fare like The Handmaid’s Tale as much as classics like La Bohème. And they want to understand what they’re seeing.

“I won’t lie, not every story is like, oh, I can really relate to that character,” Grant said. “So we talk about the experience as an audience member. This is your granddaughter’s first time at the theater, and her eyes light up when she sees Cinderella on the stage. Or this is your cultural date night out; you get a cocktail in downtown Raleigh and then come take pictures under the chandelier.”

NC Opera also uses edutainment events to make opera more relatable. Madama Butterfly had a sake tasting at the Raleigh wine school Vitis House, while the April production of Verdi’s Il Trovatore will have a metalwork class at ShopSpace, playing off the opera’s “Anvil Chorus.” These enticements get new people in the door, and perhaps half of them will come back next season—the sliver of territory where opera stakes out its stubborn gains.

“The performing arts model for nonprofits in regional areas, it’s hard,” Grant said. “You have to be fundraising so much because no matter what you do, the ticket sales are not going to pay for the shows. In opera, it can be, ‘we’ve always done this,’ or ‘this is what people expect.’ But Eric listens to the audience and staff and artists, and he adapts. I think that has allowed us to be more nimble, to move with what’s working now.”

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Katie Aiello Bridges is one of those vaunted new subscribers. She didn’t grow up with live opera. Her first experience of it was while studying in Italy via NC State, stumbling into a low-budget La Traviata in a Venetian palazzo.

“Everybody was casually dressed,” she said, “and it wasn’t like a big, beautiful production. But the music was just soul-grabbing.”

Now she works as a mental health therapist and finds opera’s stories of abundant humanity healing. When she became an NC Opera subscriber in 2025, she bought two seats so she could bring along friends, and she’s enjoyed seeing the connections they make. At 37, she’s a noticeably youthful presence in Memorial Auditorium. 

“My husband doesn’t love the opera, but he loves metal music,” she said. “When I brought him, he was like, ‘Oh, I get why you like this.’ The way the notes resonate is very similar. I grew up in theater and married my stage manager, so he’s enjoying it from the perspective of the set work and things like that.”

And she didn’t find the story of Madama Butterfly too strange at all.

“A lot of the themes are relevant today,” she said. “The way people are treated, the way we view other people, the way that we feel entitled to things. I think that was a powerful story to tell right now.”

NC Opera’s success with the classics allows it to take calculated risks on a newer or more obscure work, whether it’s Mexican composer Daniel Catán’s Florencia en el Amazonas or Jules Massenet’s dreamy French Cinderella.

“Eric’s programming is a really nice balance of what’s artistically exciting and what’s going to bring people in the door,” Grant said. “He doesn’t get caught up in the artistic ego trap of ‘I don’t want to appeal to the masses.’ When we program something like Florencia en el Amazonas, a newer work by opera standards, written in the 1990s, Spanish-language, it’s beautiful, beautiful music, one of the best things we’ve ever put on stage. But it didn’t sell as well because people don’t know the title or story. Eric knew that it wouldn’t and didn’t get into saying, ‘we have to make X number of dollars.’” 

“Growth for the sake of growth is not the point,” Grant continued. “We don’t have a large budget, so I can’t go paste the opera on the sides of buses all around town. A lot of what I do is opening the door, making sure that you’re having the most welcoming, engaging experience possible.” 

It turns out the classics don’t need added pizzazz if you can use it to draw people to them.

“This has been a tradition going on since 1597,” Mitchko said. “It’s been passed down from generation to generation. It’s been accumulated. So you want to be sure not to lose that stuff. What we can do is make these pieces come to life right now, in Raleigh, in 2026.” 

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