*Matinées Only*

“Lilo & Stitch” is the wildly funny and touching story of a lonely Hawaiian girl and the fugitive alien who helps to mend her broken family. The film is directed by award-winning filmmaker Dean Fleischer Camp, with a screenplay by Chris Kekaniokalani Bright and Mike Van Waes, and stars Sydney Elizebeth Agudong, Billy Magnussen, Tia Carrere, Hannah Waddingham, Chris Sanders, with Courtney B. Vance, and Zach Galifianakis, and introducing Maia Kealoha. “Lilo & Stitch” is produced by Jonathan Eirich, p.g.a. and Dan Lin, with Tom Peitzman, Ryan Halprin, Louie Provost, Thomas Schumacher serving as executive producers.

The Metropolitan Opera’s 2025–26 Live in HD season comes to a close with a live transmission of American composer Gabriela Lena Frank’s first opera, a magical-realist portrait of Mexico’s painterly power couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, with libretto by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Nilo Cruz. Fashioned as a reversal of the Orpheus and Euridice myth, the story depicts Frida, sung by leading mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, leaving the underworld on the Day of the Dead and reuniting with Diego, portrayed by baritone Carlos Álvarez. The famously feuding pair briefly relive their tumultuous love, embracing both the passion and the pain before bidding the land of the living a final farewell. Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Met-premiere staging of Frank’s opera, a “confident, richly imagined score” (The New Yorker) that “bursts with color and fresh individuality” (Los Angeles Times). The vibrant new production, taking enthusiastic inspiration from Frida and Diego’s paintings, is directed and choreographed by Deborah Colker.

Tchaikovsky’s many moods—tender, grand, melancholy—are all given free rein in Eugene Onegin. The opera is based on Pushkin’s iconic verse novel, which reimagines the Byronic romantic anti-hero as the definitive bored Russian aristocrat caught between convention and ennui; Tchaikovsky, similarly, took Western European operatic forms and transformed them into an authentic and undeniably Russian work. At the core of the opera is the young girl Tatiana, who grows from a sentimental adolescent into a complete woman in one of the operatic stage’s most convincing character developments.

The electrifying Lise Davidsen tackles one of the ultimate roles for dramatic soprano: the Irish princess Isolde in Wagner’s transcendent meditation on love and death. Heroic tenor Michael Spyres stars opposite Davidsen as the love-drunk Tristan. Mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova reprises her signature portrayal of Brangäne, alongside bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny, who sings Kurwenal after celebrated Met appearances in Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer and Ring cycle. Bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green makes an important role debut as King Marke.

I Puritani was the final work from Vincenzo Bellini, the great Sicilian exponent of the bel canto style of opera. It was written specifically for the talents of four of the best singers of its day, and the opera’s success depends almost entirely on the vocal abilities (and artistic sensibilities) of the performers. Its depiction of madness—both in individuals and in communities—is extraordinary: The opera suggests that the veneer of sanity can slip away at any moment, that madness can plunge a person into a destructive abyss.

Giordano’s great tragedy blends verismo’s focus on the raw emotions of everyday people with the spectacle of historical grand opera. The marriage of sound and text is exemplary. More than anything, Andrea Chénier relies on engrossing performances from its lead performers for success, but the central characters are placed within an effective, larger musical canvas that bolsters the compelling star turns, rather than relying on them wholesale.

The romantic comedy Arabella was the final collaboration of Richard Strauss and his great librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. While certain elements of operatic farce are present, there is great elegance about the work, and its characters’ journeys are moving and affecting in their own way. The title character—honest, pure, well-meaning—is one of opera’s most appealing and believable characters.

La Bohème, the passionate, timeless, and indelible story of love among young artists in Paris, can stake its claim as the world’s most popular opera. It has a marvelous ability to make a powerful first impression and to reveal unsuspected treasures after dozens of hearings. At first glance, La Bohème is the definitive depiction of the joys and sorrows of love and loss; on closer inspection, it reveals the deep emotional significance hidden in the trivial things—a bonnet, an old overcoat, a chance meeting with a neighbor—that make up our everyday lives.

This operatic gem from one of the great masters of melody is a benchmark of extraordinary vocalism. The title role of the sleepwalking girl was composed for the greatest diva of the day, Giuditta Pasta (for whom Bellini also wrote the tragic role of Norma). The part requires a rare combination of innocence, charm, and breathtaking vocal virtuosity. Deeper than a comedy, but in no way a tragedy, La Sonnambula reaches its conclusion through genuine, poignant character development, rather than by intrigue or farce.