Old Maid and the Thief

Gian Carlo Menotti’s wittily satirical and sharp comedy of suburban manners and forbidden desirewas originally written for radio in 1939. This masterful one-act work has since gone on to be one of the most performed of 20th-century operas, full of the kinds of dramatic and musical bravura that made Menotti arguably the most successful composer of opera in English of the past century.

A fast-paced opera buffa, it cleverly exposes the secret desires of two residents of a small town whose world is unexpectedly turned upside down by the arrival of a handsome stranger. Their once rock-solid concern for social propriety quickly falls away in the presence of this object of desire. But who exactly is he?