Unlock Opera: Help us make the city our Stage!

Help Us Make The City Our Stage Ongoing Fundraiser!

Hello there, neighbor! What would we do with $25,000? 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 will continue bringing an exciting series of concerts:

The Opera Next Door presents The Puccini Jukebox + Summer Stoop Concert Season.

A curated program that will be touring through different neighborhoods around the city, celebrating one of opera's most beloved composers, Giacomo Puccini. Also, we will continue creating themed performances in our Summer Stoop Concert Series, where we will explore opera, art song, musical theater and more, while connecting with the community!

For 2025, we have our sights on a new Mozart production (TBA) which we hope we can tour through multiple locations in NYC, as well as continuing with our Opera Jukebox Series and Summer Stoop Concert Series.

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.