PopOpera is an independent chamber music theatre based in Paris. We perform opera up close and alive — for grown-ups and children, in earnest and with laughter.
People keep asking about the name: is it pop plus opera? Yes and no. The truth is simpler — and funnier: Popoff is our founder's surname, composer Eugène Popoff.
"I searched for a name long and painfully. I tried everything under the sun — until I realised it had been written in my passport all along."
The beginnings. Saint Petersburg
Our story begins long before Paris. For fifteen years, from 2007 to 2022, Eugène Popoff was an artist of Yuri Alexandrov's chamber theatre St. Petersburg Opera — a legendary stage where opera is performed at arm's length from the audience.
All the while, he was writing music of his own. The ballet Before Sunset after Hauptmann (St. Petersburg Music Hall, 2015). The ballet The Black Man after Yesenin's poem (Skorokhod, 2017). The opera The Last Night of the War (St. Anne's Church, 2018). Operatic miniatures after Filatov and Zoshchenko. And every time, to get the music onto a stage, the author had to be his own producer, administrator, fundraiser and bill-poster.
"I didn't want to be a cog in a huge theatrical machine where nothing depends on me. I wanted to do it my own way — however long, however hard, but my way."
The turning point came in 2019, with the completion of a children's musical, All Because of Jam! — a story about ghosts who steal the children's jam. Yes, that really is the plot, and children in the audience take this crime very seriously. Stage it in someone else's theatre? No way. And so his own was born — with Anna Rabzina as director and rehearsals in the evenings.
What followed was like a well-made play: the pandemic nearly buried the whole venture, but the theatre held on, won a state grant — and in autumn 2021 the musical ran for four premiere performances. Full houses, warm words from professionals, a TV crew filming a report. Everything promised a sequel.
But after the war began, Eugène left Russia. Since 2023, Paris has been home.
A new chapter. Paris
In early 2026 the theatre was born a second time: the PopOpera association was registered in Boulogne. A company came together — administrator Maria Smirnova, tenor Ivan Logachev, soprano Yulia Goltser and other artists. For four months we rehearsed, looked for people, made costumes — while the founder was finishing a new opera.
On 14 June 2026 we showed our first audience a sketch of The Comedians. The audience laughed — and when you make comedy, laughter in the house is worth more than any review.
"I listened to that laughter from the stage itself: we were short-handed, so I performed in my own show along with everyone else. In chamber theatre, that happens. For a comedy writer, it's the finest sound in the world."
The Comedians is a show about life backstage: the artists quarrel, fall in love, envy, suffer — and in between, they step out and perform. Inside it are Eugène Popoff's operatic miniatures: Mozart and Salieri after Leonid Filatov's satirical play, The Aristocrat after Mikhail Zoshchenko, and a fragment of The Bear, a one-act opera after Chekhov, being written right now, racing the rehearsals.
Season 2026/27
September — a recital by Yulia Goltser. Autumn — the Paris premiere of All Because of Jam! in French. Mid-season — the premiere of the full version of The Comedians.
"A chamber theatre is not a small theatre. It is theatre in close-up."
© Yuri Alexandrov
We are heirs to that school. Here the audience sees every glance and every gesture, the music sounds close at hand, and stage and house breathe the same air.
