This week’s sold-out production of Ariadne auf Naxos is dazzling audiences with its stunning ensemble performance of Richard Strauss's opera. The production also has everyone asking the same question: What are Gilligan, the Skipper (too), the Millionaire, the Movie Star, the Professor and Mary Ann doing on an opera stage?

In this short video, stage director Chas Rader-Shieber discusses his Curtis Opera Theatre production, and how Strauss’s beautiful opera-within-an-opera explores the collision of high art with low art, as a buttoned-up opera company is forced to perform on the same stage with a brash comedy troupe. The opera about Ariadne, marooned on a deserted island by Bacchus, takes a farcical twist when the comics show up dressed as TV’s most famous group of Castaways.