New York City Opera is no more, and the Metropolitan Opera’s coming season has been thrown into doubt as its fraught labor negotiations continue. But the far smaller Gotham Chamber Opera announced Sunday that its 13th season would feature two productions this fall.
Gotham will open its season Oct. 14 with a double bill of short comic operas by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu: “Alexandre bis,” a surrealist comedy involving a test of fidelity and a shaved beard, and “Comedy on the Bridge,” which was originally written for radio but staged to acclaim in New York City in 1951 in an auditorium at Hunter College. (Olin Downes wrote then in The New York Times that the “audience laughed itself to exhaustion.”)
It will run through Oct. 18 at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College. It will be the company’s second Martinu double-bill; in 2002, when it was known as the Henry Street Chamber Opera, it performed “Les Larmes du Couteau” and “Hlas Lesa.”
Gotham’s other production will be a revival: it is bringing back its 2010 production of Xavier Montsalvatge’s “El gato con botas,” or “Puss in Boots,” to El Museo del Barrio from Dec. 6 through Dec. 13. The puppetry-filled production will be directed by Moisés Kaufman.