Only five months or so into his tenure as the new head of Lyric Opera of Chicago, John Mangum is working hard to bring the number of its seasonal offerings back to the pre-pandemic high of 66 in 2017-18 and get its finances on a more even keel.
Slightly more long term, he is already looking ahead to how the company should mark a pair of significant milestones in 2029-30 — the company’s 75th anniversary and the 100th anniversary of the Lyric Opera House (formerly the Civic Opera House).
“We’re really thinking about ‘29-‘30 and what that is going to look like,” Mangum said. “We want to celebrate.”
Mangum’s big addition to the upcoming season is seven performances of “Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness,” a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the classic album of that title by the Chicago alternative band, the Smashing Pumpkins.
Billy Corgan, co-founder and lead guitarist of the Pumpkins, attended Lyric’s March presentation of Mozart’s “Requiem” and loved the experience. He reached to out the company about presenting what Mangum is calling an “evening-length, musical-dramatic experience” based on arranged and orchestrated music from “Mellon Collie.” It will feature Lyric’s orchestra and chorus as well as Corgan and a group of operatically trained soloists.
“We’re really excited,” Mangum said. “He’s Chicago. He’s local. It’s a legendary album in the annals of alt-rock. And the fact that he wanted to do the celebration here and make his art here at Lyric is really exciting.”
Corgan, who was at Lyric Tuesday for the season announcement media event to talk about his work, has been coming to see productions there for some 20 years. During that time, people have asked him, he said, if he’d ever considered a collaboration.
“And I would always say, ‘Absolutely, but I don’t think they would want to work with me,'” Corgan said.
The resulting collaboration came about through “back channel” discussions, he said.
“I really want this work to play within the confines here at the Lyric. This is not a rock goes opera or opera goes rock. This is really to celebrate the compositional aspect of the work,” Corgan said.
He added, “A good composition, whether it’s by the Beatles or Gershwin, is transferable to other mediums.”
Corgan said he will be performing as part of the production, but “I mostly want to get out of the way.”
For now, though, Mangum is focused on the 2025-26 lineup, which Lyric announced Tuesday, which will feature six fully staged opera productions, including favorites like “Madama Butterfly” and “Così fan tutte” and less frequently presented works such as the Lyric premiere of Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea” (1797).
The latter was an important showcase for famed 20th century soprano Maria Callas. Featured in the title role of this co-production with New York’s Metropolitan Opera, where it was seen in 2022, will be Lyric regular Sondra Radvanovsky.
“You can only do that opera when you have a Sondra Radvanovsky-type soprano to do it,” Mangum said. “It’s a great vehicle for her.”
Mangum, 50, a seasoned arts administrator who formerly led the Houston Symphony Orchestra, was named Lyric’s general director, president and chief executive officer in July, replacing Anthony Freud, who stepped down in 2024 after 13 years.
Because of the long planning process necessary in opera, nearly all of Lyric’s 2025-26 season was set by the time Mangum arrived in October. The first season over which he will have complete control will not come until 2028-29.
The general director hopes to present more offerings like “Mellon Collie” that can stretch the company and attract new audiences. “It’s a way to push the art form in new directions but stays true to what we are, which is music and drama” he said.
After tough operatic deficits in the wake of the COVID-19 shutdown, Lyric began a five-year financial plan to get back to balanced budgets. The company is in the second year of that effort, and Mangum said everything is on track to reach that goal.
The company did run a $10.6 operating deficit in 2023-24 but raised ticket sales by 17 percent and overall revenue by 15 percent. The season overrun was covered by what Magnum called “board-designated investments,” essentially a “rainy day fund,” which meant that the company did not have to take on any debt.
“The real vision here, is to do more but to do it differently. We don’t want to throw out the tradition. We want to maintain the tradition and have big, blockbuster productions that get people really excited, but we also want to figure out new ways to make our art and be innovative.”
As executive director and CEO at the Houston Symphony, Mangum oversaw a 50 percent growth in its endowment and secured $60 million in capital gifts for the first major renovation of Jones Hall, the orchestra’s home since 1966.
“I’d love to be able to raise significant funds for the endowment here,” he said, “and that’s just a matter of relationships and tenure. There are a lot of people with long-standing, very deep relationships to this company.”
During his first year with the company, Mangum is making a point of reaching out to those contributors and traveling extensively, becoming acquainted or reacquainted with singers, agents and opera leaders in the United States and abroad.
“Just making sure that Lyric is front and center and in the mix and in the conversation,” he said.
The number of Lyric performances for 2025-26 stands at 59 but could grow to 62 with the possible addition of some as-yet-unannounced offerings. That is a 25 percent increase beyond the 47 performances this season.
Other offerings in the 2025 season include the famed choral work, “Carmina Burana” (Nov. 14-18); a Feb. 5, 2026, recital featuring famed soprano Renée Fleming, and concert-style performances April 17-18 of “safronia,” an “Afro-surrealist opera” with music and libretto by Chicago Poet Laureate avery r. young.
In 2017-18, Lyric presented eight fully staged operas. While Mangum said believes the company can present that number of operas again in one season, they will probably not all be fully staged because of the massive cost of such undertakings.
Instead, he foresees more hybrid and semistaged offerings like “Mellon Collie” or Radvanovsky’s February program, “The Puccini Heroines,” in which the orchestra was onstage and each song was accompanied with sweeping video projections.
Mangum has a somewhat unconventional background for his current position, because he spent the last 28 years working in the orchestral realm. He sees that experience as an advantage because orchestras often approach opera in unusual and inventive ways.
“There is this path,” he said, “where work is being developed by orchestras in the States and opera houses in Europe that leans heavily on video and using the physical space of the auditorium to create a different kind of experience. If we’re open to those kinds of innovations, that is the path back to more activity.”
He pointed, for example, to the “Tristan Project” at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which offered an alternative take on Wagner’s famed 1856-59 opera, “Tristan and Isolde.” The 2004 semistaged version, created by director Peter Sellars with video by famed artist Bill Viola, featured singers performing portions of the work offstage in the hall.
“The real vision here,” Mangum said, “is to do more but to do it differently. We don’t want to throw out the tradition. We want to maintain the tradition and have big, blockbuster productions that get people really excited, but we also want to figure out new ways to make our art and be innovative.”
In 2013, Lyric began its American Musical Theater Initiative, mostly annual, large-scale productions of Broadway classics like “Oklahoma!,” “Carousel,” “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “West Side Story.”
But because the scene in Chicago has changed, he said, with other theaters presenting more such offerings, and the rights to certain titles becoming more difficult to obtain, the company is not presenting a Broadway production this season, and none is included on the 2025-26 lineup.
But Lyric is not abandoning Broadway. “We’re going to do it on an opportunistic basis,” Mangum said, “when we can get a great title that we know will sell roughly 100,000 tickets in three weeks, which is what we have to do for that [model] to work.”
At the same time, Mangum is committed to completing Lyric’s “Ring” Cycle, an epic set of four operas by Richard Wagner that many see as the pinnacle of the form. Lyric began in 2016-17 presenting each successive opera over four years, but the process was interrupted in March 2020 by the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the four were never presented as a group.
Sometimes when new leaders take over companies, they insist on their own artistic teams for major projects like this. But Mangum wants to complete the cycle that was begun under his predecessor and features scenic designs by Johan Engels, who died in 2014, and Robert Innes Hopkins.
“I think we owe that to the creative team who put their work into this,” he said.
The question is: When? Because both the San Francisco Opera and Metropolitan Opera are at various stages of “Ring” cycles, Lyric will have to wait to be assured of getting a top-level cast, and funding has to be secured in advance.
“I’m hoping we don’t have to wait 10 years for it,” Mangum said.
Contributing: Stefano Esposito