Artist Profile
Justin Ryan is delighted to make his Chance Theater debut in Sweeney Todd. The operatic baritone has appeared most recently at New York City Opera, Chicago Opera Theater, Opera San Jose, Long Beach Opera, and the American Symphony Orchestra at Lincoln Center, garnering critical acclaim as an accomplished interpreter of American men, including a vituperous Edward Hopper in Stewart Wallace/Michael Korie’s surrealist fantasy, Hopper’s Wife (NYCO), a racially motivated lead investigator in Anthony Davis’s Pulitzer-winning Central Park Five (LBO), the impossibly positioned first mate Starbuck in Jake Heggie’s Moby Dick (San Jose), and tortured investment banker Edward in the world premiere of Iain Bell’s Stonewall (NYCO). He covered the pernicious truth-denying lawyer Roy Cohn in Peter Eotvos’s adaptation of Angels in America (NYCO), and he won wide acclaim as the domineering 20th century visionary Walt Disney in the American premier of Phillip Glass’s The Perfect American (LBO, COT). Justin and wife Lara are long-time New Yorkers who now reside in Orange County.