PRESS & REVIEWS
Next to Normal (April 17-19, 2026)
“The entire cast delivers top-notch acting and singing. The timing is impeccable. Solos are crystal-clean; voices blend and complement each other in duets and in company numbers.”
- Kurt Benrud, for Triangle Review
“[Paradox Opera’s] superior actors (and music and stage directors) found new and moving character and plot revelations in a rarely performed musical that I thought I already knew. Bravo. A major step forward for an intrepid emerging company, at The Fruit.”
- Byron Woods
“Durham-based company Paradox Opera, directed by Eric Love, captured this illusion of stability with remarkable precision. Rather than treating the musical’s emotional devastation as spectacle, the production grounded it in the quiet repetition of survival: strained routines, fractured communication, and the relentless effort to continue living amid unresolved grief. The cast’s cohesion lent the family dynamic a painful authenticity, creating a household that felt loving, exhausted, and perpetually on the verge of collapse.”
- Celeste Markey (full review here)
Don Giovanni Abridged! (September 2024)
“The festival audience howled as Hyland and Roca subbed in significantly different lyrics to Mozart’s score, including particularly risqué addendums to “La ci darem la mano” (There we will hold hands) and “Mi tradi quell’alma ingrata (Cruel heart, thou hast betrayed me).”
- Byron Woods, for Cultural Voice of North Carolina
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (August 2024)
“…the disquiet of Chumbley’s birds on Arko’s piano cedes to the calming tectonics of earthbound domestic order. As the movement ends, the composer provides a setting for Hyland’s voice that’s as deceptively simple, stylistically, as a clean, white ceramic plate: no more than what is needed, and perfect in its unobtrusiveness and support.”
- Byron Woods, for Cultural Voice of North Carolina
“[“Calling for Jane”] underscores some of the changes that founder Roca wants to see in her art form, as an accessible new work her company commissioned to speak to the present moment in our culture. And when Roca performs it live, outside the North Carolina State Legislature building … it will also underscore the change that many want to see in our current body politic.”
- Byron Woods, for Indy Week
Autonomy (March 2023)
“The company and its work represent a series of departures from business as usual in the opera world. The focus and subject matter are clearly present-tense; the production logos, which merge graffiti with edgy graphic novel sensibilities, are clearly pitched to a younger audience.”
- Byron Woods, for Indy Week