The Opera House Opens Its Doors to Daytime Wanderers

Free lunchtime rehearsals and open backstage corridors are pulling in audiences the evening programme never reached. The details, assembled from interviews and documents reviewed by The News Tribune, sketch a picture more textured than the headline suggests.

The economics are fragile, sustained by a patchwork of grants, memberships and stubbornness. Nobody involved pretends otherwise.

The quiet work is the real work. The rest is theatre.

The project began, as many good ones do, with a constraint: not enough money to do the obvious thing, and just enough conviction to try the interesting one.

The wider picture

Whether the gamble pays off will take years to know. What is already clear is that someone was willing to make it.