Music / Theatre & dance
Yuval Sharon
born 1979 · opera director
MacArthur-winning opera director who was artistic director of Detroit Opera from 2020 to 2025 and staged opera in parking garages and a gutted movie palace.
- Born
Chicago, Illinois- Detroit years
- 2020–2025
- Field
- Music, Theatre & dance
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Sharon, raised in the Chicago suburbs and known for The Industry, his experimental opera company in Los Angeles, became the first American to direct at Germany's Bayreuth Festival in 2018. In 2020 Michigan Opera Theatre named him its Gary L. Wasserman Artistic Director, and the company was renamed Detroit Opera in 2022. His Detroit debut, in October 2020, was Twilight: Gods, a pandemic-era drive-through version of Wagner's Götterdämmerung staged on the levels of the Detroit Opera House parking center. He later presented Ragnar Kjartansson's Bliss, a twelve-hour loop of a moment from The Marriage of Figaro, inside the former Michigan Theater, now a parking garage, and a reverse-chronology La bohème that traveled to Boston, Philadelphia and Spoleto. At the end of 2025 he announced his early departure after budget cuts forced the company to cancel planned new productions.
Highlights
- Artistic director of Detroit Opera, 2020–2025
- Twilight: Gods, a drive-through Götterdämmerung in the opera house garage (2020)
- Staged Bliss in the former Michigan Theater parking garage
- MacArthur Fellow (2017); first American director at Bayreuth (2018)
02 / Their Detroit places
Their Detroit places 2
Where they lived, worked, performed and liked to hang out. Closed and demolished places stay here too, because they are part of the city's history.
Worked here · 2020–2025
Detroit Opera House
Home of Detroit Opera during Sharon's tenure; his first Detroit production used the opera house's multi-level parking center next door.
Related place · 2020s
220 Bagley Night Club
Closed · 1926–1976
The ornate 1926 movie palace, gutted into a parking garage in the 1970s, where Sharon presented Kjartansson's Bliss for Detroit Opera.