Houston Chronicle
February 2026
Both the 2023 production and its recording were led by soprano Janai Brugger and mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton as the Civil War-era story's pair of unlikely partner spies.
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Houston Chronicle
San Francisco Classical Voice
December 2025
Twenty-five years after its premiere, composer Jake Heggie and librettist Terrence McNally’s empathic opera about a Death Row inmate and the Catholic nun who becomes his spiritual adviser felt more dramatically intense than ever in its return to SF Opera and was filled with wrenching performances.
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Opera Now
November 2025
"I walked into this assuming that if somebody's on death row, they probably deserve to be there. I unlearned a lot of things that I think the criminal justice system is very happy to let people assume. I'm grateful to this piece for challenging me to ask, ‘Okay, where do I really sit? How do I feel about this thing that both affects and ends lives?’"
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Limelight Magazine
October 2025
Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton and Heggie have worked in recital and on song cycles, so it’s little surprise that she delivers an incandescent performance.
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San Francisco Chronicle
September 2025
“It shows you the story from all the different aspects,” Barton said. At no point does it tell you, ‘You have to be on his side,’ or ‘You shouldn’t be on his side. I’m so glad it’s Jake Heggie who wrote this because he really knows how to flesh out a human story, and Sister Helen Prejean is as human as it gets in so many ways.”
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