For the first time in its history, Opera Omaha is to take on an opera by Richard Strauss! And what a piece it is, with the hilarious opera-within-an-opera Ariadne Auf Naxos being the production gracing the Orpheum stage. Strauss' 1912 classic is a self-aware story, about a highly serious opera that somehow accidentally ends up as a chaotic comedy featuring a troupe of clowns. A delightful de-construction of opera as an artform and the ever-raging battle between "high art" and "low art" for a place in the public consciousness, Steven White conducts and Chas Rader-Shieber directs this magnificent work.