A Gershwin opera about an American president who won’t accept election results is coming back to Philadelphia after 93 years

The election is held and the results are clear, but the president doesn’t accept the outcome. He stages a coup and establishes a dictatorship. He decides to renovate the White House.

So goes the plot of one of Opera Philadelphia’s major offerings next season.

The piece was written in 1933.

Let ‘Em Eat Cake by George and Ira Gershwin was poorly received when it premiered, and it disappeared for most of the decades since. But Opera Philadelphia is reviving the piece now, just as real-life events seem to have rather freakishly caught up to it.

Down with one and one make two

Down with everything in view

Down with all majorities

Likewise all minorities

Down with you and you and you

With lyrics like this, you don’t have to do much to connect the dots for audiences, says Opera Philadelphia general director and president Anthony Roth Costanzo.

“You couldn’t write a better farce about what’s going on in the world than this,” said Costanzo, who happened upon the oft-forgotten work while digging around online at 4 o’clock one morning. “It was one of those moments when I just thought, ‘Well, we’ve got to do it.’”

Let ‘Em Eat Cake is one of five works Opera Philadelphia is mounting next season, the company announced Tuesday, and the other four come with degrees of novelty no less striking.

A Mozart opera written when the composer was 14 years old; Verdi’s Aida stylized in an African Surrealist aesthetic; a new work structured like the episodes of a TV sitcom; and an operatic treatment of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer.

Let ‘Em Eat Cake will be the first Broadway show ever staged by 51-year-old Opera Philadelphia. Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, performed by the company twice, ran on Broadway, but is considered an opera.

“It is a wild, taut, witty, pessimistic bludgeoning of knavish politics,” Brooks Atkinson wrote of the October 1933 Broadway opening of Let ‘Em Eat Cake at the Imperial Theatre, noting how unenjoyable an evening he had.

When the New York Times critic went back to see the show again to reconsider its merits, he wrote that on second thought, he had been right all along.

Others, through the years, have felt differently.

“The score of Let ‘Em Eat Cake is one of the Gershwins’ finest, a still unrecognized landmark of the American musical theatre,” wrote George Gershwin biographer Edward Jablonski. “If the word ‘operetta’ implies little opera, then Let ‘Em Eat Cake is a remarkable collection of eight little operas. It marks George Gershwin on the threshold of opera with an authentic American accent: his."

Let ‘Em Eat Cake — with a book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind — is the sequel to Of Thee I Sing, by the same team. The earlier work was the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama. But Let ‘Em Eat Cake has a good deal more edge. The plot is zany, the music both ridiculous and beautiful, the pace manic, and the lyrics biting.

“This is one of the first stagings of this opera since 1933,” says Costanzo, “and it bridges worlds between the lush familiar music of Gershwin, but you also hear a kind of operatic dystopia.”

Artistic ambition of this sort might not have been a given at the opera company, which has struggled with chronic underfunding for years. But quickly after taking over the company in 2024, Costanzo began a major fundraising drive to pay off debt and support artistic projects.

The campaign has reached $21 million on a goal of $33 million, and the shift toward more philanthropy has come in tandem with a new $11, pick-your-price ticket program. Those tickets have proved popular, and they will continue next season in a slightly different form that will reward patron loyalty (details below).

What the funding supports on stage continues the company’s identity of blurring or even defying genre lines, but traditionalists will be pleased by two titles. The season-opener in September is Mitridate, re di Ponto, premiered in 1770 when Mozart was 14.

“It’s a beautiful Mozart opera and a great Mozart opera, but you don’t see it very often because it’s almost impossible to sing the tenor lead role,” said Costanzo. “So when the great Larry Brownlee said, ‘I want to sing it,’ I said, ‘Oh, my God,’ and he said, ‘And I want you to play the castrato role.’”

And so Lawrence Brownlee takes the title role, Costanzo sings his eldest son, Farnace, with soprano Lauren Snouffer appearing as Aspasia. Corrado Rovaris conducts.

Suddenly Last Summer, in October, is a first opera from composer Courtney Bryan, in a production by Daniel Fish, who is perhaps best known for a 2019 production of Oklahoma! that won a Tony Award for best musical revival.

“Its form is really unusual — there’s a lot of spoken dialogue,” says Costanzo of the new work by Bryan, who is Opera Philadelphia’s composer in residence. “We’re excited to do it in the Forrest, which we haven’t been in ever.”

The piece, led by conductor Nathan Koci, gets its world premiere this June at the Fisher Center at Bard College.

January brings Let ‘Em Eat Cake — not at the Forrest Theatre, where it played briefly in 1934, but in the Academy of Music. Rovaris conducts the Opera Philadelphia Orchestra and Chorus, and Zack Winokur is director.

The Aida, in the Academy in April 2027, features soprano Tiffany Townsend in her first time in the title role, and director Kaneza Schaal and artist Christopher Myers. Rovaris conducts the Opera Philadelphia Orchestra and Chorus.

Costanzo called Schaal “one of our great operatic hopes as a director,” and said the production takes in influences from around the world, including African Surrealism.

“It’s not a spare, modern, cold Aida. It’s lush, it’s full of color, it’s full of symbolism, but it’s unlike any Aida I’ve seen."

The season closes with another premiere: Sitcom, with music by Luke Styles and a libretto by Alan McKendrick, in May 2027 at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre.

“It is totally ridiculous and hilarious,” says Costanzo. “The characters, like in sitcoms — if you think of something like The Simpsons — they go through this whole journey and then it’s all reset for the next episode and they start back from zero as the same characters. And so for the format of an opera, it’s really fun. I think there’ll be a commercial break and that kind of thing.”

Costanzo said the pick-your-price program will be adjusted for next season; $11 tickets will be available, “but our steadfast subscribers get first access to seats.”

He said the company budget will increase slightly in 2026-27, to $14.1 million from this year’s $13.1 million. The increase is from inflation, but also represents “an investment in the art as we continue to grow,” said Costanzo.

That means support for the new, smaller, and more innovative works, as well as opera at its most grand, like Aida.

“That’s part of the mission of our campaign, to make sure that we can present operas on all scales.”

Subscription packages and Opera Passes for the 2026-27 Season go on sale Tuesday at 10 a.m. at operaphila.org, 215-732-8400. The pick-your-price presale begins June 30 at 10 a.m., when 2026-27 Opera Pass holders may purchase pick-your-price tickets to the entire season. For the general public, pick-your-price tickets go on sale Aug. 4 for Mitridate and Suddenly Last Summer; and Nov. 23 for Let ‘Em Eat Cake, Aida and Sitcom.