Here, the young and recently celebrated director Eric Einhorn takes a simple but effective approach, which goes a long way toward putting some distance between our 21st-century multicultural world and Puccini’s Eurocentric vision of “The Orient.” The curtain rises on a young father and daughter curled up in a chair, reading a bedtime story. He sings to her from the book, explaining the edict at the heart of the story they are about to read.

Einhorn also invents some clever business to get us through the dramatically inert Act Two scene with Ping, Pang, and Pong. And he knows how to shift focus in the opera’s huge crowd scenes so we know where to focus our attention.

Overall it was a solid production with some stirring singing and inventive stagecraft, which definitely thrilled an audience hungry for one of the Italian classics.

-Milwaukee Magazine, November 7, 2011

Director Eric Einhorn added a bit of stage business to the production – a father reading a story to his daughter. The addition is the perfect vehicle for keeping the story in fairy-tale context.

-Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, November 5, 2011