♪♪ ♪♪ You should be ready for a lot of surprises and you should be ready to not only have your eyes to the stage, but your eyes and ears to all of your surroundings.

[ Singing in Italian ] Our "Tosca" is about a group of actors, singers, activists who are trying to put up Puccini's "Tosca," with all of the beautiful stories and complicated stories on a stage without the censorship.

[ Singing in Italian ] The place and location that the show is going up is in a country that they are not allowed to show their love, their criticism toward their politics, their -- any oppression that they're experiencing.

This piece that's about love and revolution in a way that few others are is so immediately true to situations that are really happening all around us today.

[ Singing in Italian ] I really would wish every kind of audience member who can have access to this show to come and in this room, because I think we're living in a world that human rights and just rights of having a safe and beautiful life has become so political, and it does not need to be political.

And my hope is that when you come and watch this show, when you see the humanity of these characters onstage with the beautiful music that accompanies that, you forget about which side of politics you're standing, but you just understand desire or fear of someone who is telling you that maybe all of us don't have the same privileges.

And maybe it is a privilege to hold someone onstage and say "I love you."

And maybe there's still people around the world that they cannot freely express their love, their fear, their desire to what to be, and maybe not all of us can fulfill our dreams because there is a bigger thing holding us and making us feel smaller.

And that doesn't necessarily need to be analyzed through news media or, like, our politics, but here, in this show, you get to sit back and be scared with us and desire love and life with us and not know where that's coming from.

[ Singing in Italian ] I think that we do opera in a way that nobody else is doing and I think that anyone who is the greatest opera fan or has never been to an opera or doesn't even know what opera really looks like or sounds like or feels like is going to walk into the audience with Heartbeat and to these particular shows and have their minds blown.

[ Both singing in Italian ]