Opera Memphis is closing out a season that General Director Ned Canty described as “an A-plus artistically” with one of the most ambitious final productions in recent company history. Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street opens June 12 at Playhouse on the Square and runs through July 12, 2026, presented in partnership with Playhouse on the Square as a co-production that brings Opera Memphis’s orchestral resources together with Playhouse’s theatrical staging tradition.
The run anchors a 2025-26 season built around the idea that opera can meet audiences anywhere, from a planetarium dome to a downtown concert hall. The season opened in October with I Hear America Singing at Crosstown Theatre, the first project supported by Opera Memphis’s National Endowment for the Arts America250 grant. From there the company traveled to the AutoZone Sharpe Planetarium for Lazer Divas Vs. The Sky Pirates of Destiny in November, brought Rossini’s The Barber of Seville to the mainstage in January, premiered the new chamber opera Pretty Little Room at Crosstown Theater in March, presented Grammy-nominated mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton in recital at the University of Memphis later that month, and partnered with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra for Verdi’s Requiem on March 28.
Sweeney Todd gives Memphis audiences a chance to experience one of the most demanding hybrid works in American musical theater. Sondheim wrote the score with an operatic ambition rare on Broadway: extended scenes built around chromatic harmony, dense vocal counterpoint, and a structural arc closer to Berg’s Wozzeck than to Oklahoma!. Done well, it sits comfortably in the operatic repertoire and rewards the kind of attention that opera audiences bring.
Subscribers to the 2025-26 season already hold their Sweeney Todd tickets. Single tickets are available through Playhouse on the Square at playhouseonthesquare.org.
Looking ahead, Opera Memphis will mark its 70th anniversary with the 2026-27 season. The season announcement is expected in early June, with subscription renewals opening first and public single tickets following. New Handorf Company Artists will be announced shortly after the season reveal.
