Photo by Lynn Lane

HOUSTON GRAND OPERA’S second fall repertoire production is Gioachino Rossini’s Cinderella. The colorful, commedia dell'arte-inspired production opens Friday, Oct. 25, and stars Grammy Award-winning mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard — a breathtaking brunette beauty, even when doused in soot — in bel canto role of Angelina, known to her mean step-sisters as “Cenerentola.”

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Art + Entertainment

BRETT MILLER WAS just 10 years old when his parents took him to a screening of the 1925 silent film, The Phantom of the Opera, starring Lon Chaney as “The Phantom” of the Paris Opera House, with an accompanying soundtrack played live by an organist. The film contains one of the most famous “reveals” on celluloid (We won’t give it away!) and is all the more shocking when accompanied by live music played on the Phantom’s favorite instrument.

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Jacob Hilton, a.k.a. Travid Halton, at home in his kitchen, where he enjoys cooking as a form of therapy.

PINK FLOYD'S THE Wall. Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours. Beyonce’s Lemonade. Three divergent examples of the album as a cathartic, psychological, conceptual work, meant to be experienced in a single sitting. Houston singer-songwriter Jacob Hilton, 37, who records as Travid Halton, a portmanteau of his mother and father’s names, might balk at being mentioned in such company. (This is a thoroughly unpretentious man, who describes himself as an “archaeologist turned singer-songwriter.”)

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