Traviata – You Deserve a Better Future - Lyon Opera house (2026) - Traviata – Vous méritez un avenir meilleur - Opéra national de Lyon (2026)

Description

At the Théâtre National Populaire in Villeurbanne.

Musical theater based on La Traviata.

"The show brings together words and song, French and Italian, dreams and reality: it recreates the tensions and contradictions of a century in search of wonder in a rapidly industrializing world, the disillusionment of a society that has seen the fires of the 1848 revolution extinguished and is drowning its political despair in celebration. The stage brings this past to life. Fueled by improvisations, the performers invest themselves in their roles, constantly taking side roads, diverting them at every moment as if to convince us that, yes, "another future was possible." Like Verdi, who brings into the score the effervescence of Parisian evenings, the rhythm of a waltz and the cries of carnival, the show uses every means possible: it teems with details, while sometimes stripping itself down to leave us alone to face the mystery of the voice. At the origin of Traviata - You deserve a better future, there is actress Judith Chemla's desire to play Violetta.

In the tradition of musical theater, as claimed by the Bouffes du Nord, where this Traviata premiered, singers and musicians are placed here on an equal footing with the theater. The arrangements created by Florent Hubert and Paul Escobar help blur the lines. To move from a romantic orchestra to a chamber ensemble, they assembled a troupe of performers from both classical and jazz backgrounds, blending opera with a tarantella from Italian music, Lilac Wine – the James Shelton standard, or Schumann's The Prophetic Bird… A longtime collaborator of Samuel Achache and Jeanne Candel, Florent Hubert has created for them wild arrangements of Baroque works. For his first foray into the 19th-century Italian repertoire, he maintains this insolent freedom. Starting from the idea that in Verdi, "music becomes an act", he composes with Paul Escobar and in constant back and forth between the score and the stage a flexible form, which is constantly made and unmade, where the theatre bursts into the opera and where – reciprocally – the opera emerges from the theatre, often in an unexpected way."

More information is available on the official website of the opera house.