Unlock Opera: Let's make the city our stage!

Help Us Make The City Our Stage Fundraiser!

Hello there, neighbor! Our dream is to bring The Opera Next Door to as many people through all boroughs in NYC. So just imagine having one of our productions go on tour to a location near you! From Brooklyn to Manhattan, Queens to the Bronx and Staten Island, we hope one day to be able to create the first The Opera Next Door City Tour! Thus far, our existence has been from show to show, with stoop concerts and pop-ups in between. Reaching our goal of $25,000 will guarantee we can fund upcoming performances (info below), pay our incredible artists a fair fee and get ahead of the curve for future productions in the Winter and next Spring/Summer.

This year we are bringing an exciting new production:

The Opera Next Door presents La Carmencita.

A tango adaptation inspired by Peter Brook’s La Tragédie de Carmen and Bizet’s original Carmen, La Carmencita will be a retelling of the free-spirited and infamous gypsy who has a brief affair with Don José, a soldier and Micaëla’s childhood sweetheart, before falling in love with the toréador Escamillo and who will escape death by her ex-lover thanks to an unlikely savior.

These performances are all about sharing this art form with our community. The streets where we hold the performances will be closed down for the length of the performance, and the audience-made up largely of people that most likely have never seen an opera before-have a distinctly intimate, social, and unique experience with an art form that is usually very gate-kept. The libretto will be projected in real-time super-titles so that the audience can follow along with the action. In case you're reading this and are not yet familiar with us...

Who We Are

The Opera Next Door (TOND ) shares high-quality opera with diverse new audiences in unconventional neighborhood spaces. By giving performance opportunities to emerging artists and staging immersive, site-specific productions, TOND breathes new life into opera while reconnecting the art form to its humble, quotidian roots, forming a bridge between new audiences and traditional theaters.

How we started

Born from stoop concerts put on during the pandemic summer of 2020, The Opera Next Door was created to help fill a gap left in the artistic world by the loss of live concerts, particularly opera productions. Founder, Colombian soprano Sasha Gutiérrez, began performing arias and art songs from her stoop in Bedford-Stuyvesant for the neighborhood and anyone who cared to stop by and listen. Many of the people who listened had never heard opera before and were left amazed and curious. During this time, conversations about the concerts arose and the idea of staging an opera on the stoop was born. While the idea seemed at first untenable (putting on an opera requires an astounding amount of production and artistic work), it planted a seed in Gutiérrez’s mind. That seed is today growing into The Opera Next Door.

*If you'd like to make a donation of $200 or more, please contact us through The Opera Next Door Webpage before donating to the Gofundme campaign, as we'd like to touch base with you before your donation and help you benefit from the 501(c)3 tax write-off we can offer you through our fiscal conduit, the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance. What will we do with $25,000?