This Isn’t Your Grandma’s Opera. It’s the Most Addictive Night Out in NYC

I’ve never hated opera (because I’m very highly sophisticated) but I get why people do. As much as I don’t hate it, I rarely go. The clichés are brutal: four hours long, plotlines that move at glacial speed, and singers standing still while wailing about betrayal in a language you don’t speak. If I wanted all of that, I’d have spent more time with my Italian born great-grandmother as a child.

But this wasn’t that. This was fucking FUN. God! Remember FUN??? Like pre-COVID fun?

Heartbeat Opera’s Faust moved like theater on a bender. Sexy, funny, guttural, raw. The scenery didn’t just look good, it morphed around the performers, folding audience members into each scene like we were characters ourselves. One moment it was intimate and romantic, the next it was hell breaking loose (literally - the devil was a major player in the production.) It all transitioned so seamlessly, you never had time to check out. I would describe the experience as a group trip on LSD. But, it had better lighting and a live score. I also aliken it to a good looking stranger grabbing your face and kissing you. Unexpected, deeply moving, a little unsettling, but fun and carefree.

And the acting? Not stiff. Not operatic in the caricature sense. It was alive. Embodied. These performers weren’t just singing; they were telling secrets, making shady deals, grappling with life sometimes without mercy.

This was opera that moves. Opera that consumes. Opera that gets under your skin.

As New Yorkers, we’re always looking for something new in the arts world. Something that feels novel. Heartbeat Opera is that.

Let’s get into it.

Big Opera, Small Space, Huge Feelings

The company shrinks down sprawling operas into tight, essential narratives performed in intimate venues. You definitely don’t need those little binoculars, cool as they might be. You sit close. You feel it. Heartbeat Opera’s appeal comes down to their being a theater oriented endeavor.

“Opera is usually music first, theater second,” said Jacob Ashworth, Heartbeat’s co-founder and music director. “We flipped that.” He and the Heartbeat team—co-founders Ethan Heard, Louisa Proske, and Dan Schlosberg built the company from the ground up over a decade ago, fusing theatrical sensibility with operatic tradition.

“We work more like a theater company,” Jacob said. “It’s big opera, on a small scale.” Their shows are cut down to their emotional essence. There are fewer singers, intimate venues, and full-body sound that hits you in the chest. “The name of the company [Heartbeat] even comes from the visceral feeling of being close to a singer and having them really hit you physically and sort of resonate within your own body as you listen to them.”

The Radical Reimaginings

Heartbeat isn’t so much about revivals. It’s about reinvention. Whether it’s reinterpreting Carmen or staging Faust (the performance I saw), every show is a deep dive into the psyche of the work.

Christian De Gré Cárdenas, Heartbeat’s Executive Director, described it as “maximalist minimalism.” Picture a tasting menu instead of a buffet. It’s not about sheer volume. It’s about intensity, intention, in essence, flavor.

Another part of Heartbeat’s appeal is the condensed time frame of each performance. They don’t need four hours of your time. I’m in awe of how they get to the meat of the piece in about under two hours.

“It's an enormous task. It takes a tremendous amount of people, a huge amount of money, planning, because we care a lot about the pieces. It takes this really intense artistic process. That's very much like a slow burn kind of process.” Jacob Ashworth explains.

Drag, Drinking, and Devotion

What sets Heartbeat apart isn’t just artistic rigor, it’s vibe as the youths say. “Opera singers drink like actors,” Christian laughed. “It's always amazing to me how many cocktails a tenor can down after a show.” And yes, after every show, they hit up a bar together, no velvet ropes required.

But the real party? Their drag opera. “I really love Heartbeat and why I got involved is I went to a rehearsal of their annual drag show (you have to come to the drag show this fall). It is the best introduction for people who don't know if they like opera yet. It's the best inroad. So I went to a rehearsal of that. It was a show called The Golden Cock. It was amazing. And it was just fun. And I was like, oh, right. Opera can be fun and it can be bawdy and it can be accessible,” says Christian.

From Steel Drums to Subtitles

Both Jacob and Christian came to opera from wildly different directions. Jacob grew up in New York City, raised by a playwright-turned-opera-composer mother. He spent his childhood in the now-shuttered New York City Opera performing “about 40 productions before I turned 13,” he said. “That’s child labor you can’t get away with anymore.”

Christian, born in Mexico and raised partially in the Cayman Islands, was introduced to music via steel drums, not exactly the fast track to Puccini. “Then the press told me I was writing operas,” he said. “I was defined before I could define myself.”

Both now lead one of the most exciting opera companies in the country and that’s not hyperbole. In fact, Heartbeat has the second youngest opera audience in the U.S., a statistic backed by Opera America’s national research.

Waffle House Opera, Anyone?

When asked which opera they’d stage in a Waffle House, Jacob didn’t skip a beat. “Falstaff,” he said. “The first act would be fantastic in a Waffle House and with his minions cooking away and stacks and stacks of waffles. But then I don't know if there's any... If you could repair to the parking lot as well, you would have a great scene for your third act. That was one that I thought of.”

Christian offered, “At least the first act of Die Valkyrie, one of the operas from Wagner's Ring Cycle, would be really good in a Waffle House. A man comes in from the wilderness, does not know what doorstep he's landed on, and receives water, drink, and food from the person who is there, who turns out to be his sister, who he then falls in love with, and then it's an incestuous love affair.”

It’s this (above) kind of blend of reverence and irreverence that defines Heartbeat Opera.

So Is Opera Dead? Not Even Close.

Christian said it best: “That said, there was an article I read from 1965 that said opera is finally making a comeback. And then I read another article that was written 13 years later that said opera is getting younger than ever. And then there was another article I read in the early 1800s in Paris about how finally opera is getting the attention it deserves. So, that's only for me to say I feel like we're constantly in the space where opera is dying and it's a dying art form and no one's ever going to come see it and it's fading and things are closing. And also somehow having a rebirth at the same time.”

Final Act: Get to a Show

Opera can be drag. It can be wild. It can be a Waffle House fantasy. But most of all, it can be yours.

If you’ve never been, start here. If you think opera isn’t for you, definitely start here. And if you’re like me (again, highly sophisticated and fun-loving) you’ll realize: this isn’t opera how you thought you knew it.

This is Heartbeat.

And this is the experience so many of us have been searching for.