I recently spoke with Rachel Kobernick (Laurie Moss) and Laura Zahn (Ma Moss), who will be starring in Park City Opera’s upcoming July 2026 production of Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land. 

If you open a certain cabinet in my parents’ house, you might find all of the books that my sisters and I read in school. For some well-known titles, you’ll find multiple editions of those books: take Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. I count: a Bantam Classics edition (mine from middle school), a Folger Shakespeare Library edition (my sister’s from high school), and an Oxford Shakespeare edition (mine from college). For such a well-known work, even though the source material is about 430 years old, we have multiple modern editions that present different critical commentary and illuminate how different folios or manuscript sources have contributed to our current understanding of the text. In other words, even a work as familiar as Romeo and Juliet does not exist in just one fixed form.

Last month, I sat down with Nicole Heinen and Patrick Bessenbacher, who I will direct in the title roles of Park City Opera’s production of Roméo et Juliette. We discussed their characters, their relationship to Shakespeare’s play, and their thoughts about the opera ahead of our August 2026 performances in Park City.