Chicago Opera Theater
non-profit organization in the USA
The Chicago Opera Theater (COT) is an American opera company based in Chicago, Illinois. COT is a resident company at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Chicago's Millennium Park and is currently in residence at the newly renovated Studebaker Theater in the historic Fine Arts Building. In addition to productions of selected operas from the core opera repertoire, COT has an emphasis on American composers, Chicago premieres, and producing new contemporary operas for a 21st-century audience.
Alan Stone founded the company as the Chicago Opera Studio in 1974. Stone utilised Jones Commercial High School as the mainstage location for the company until 1976. Subsequently, the company held a residency at the Athenaeum Theatre on the north side of Chicago through 2004. The company also gave occasional performances at the Merle Reskin Theater of De Paul University and at Rosary College in River Forest, Illinois.
Stone served as artistic director of COT until 1993. General managers of COT have included Marc Scorca (1984-1990), Mark Tiarks, Jean Perkins, and Joseph De Rugeriis.
Brian Dickie became general director of COT in 1999, and held the post until August 2012.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Chicago Opera Theater” is non-profit organization in the USA. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Chicago, Opera and Theater, not as a finished interpretation.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5095724. VIAF identifies the subject as 123475598. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1974, 1976, 2004 and 1993.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chicago Opera Theater” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.