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Press 
Harvey Milk is one of the best new operas in years.
Harvey Milk is an astounding achievement -- lively, artful, tough-minded American music-drama, deeply satisfying to ear, eye and mind.
A triumph, mounted with an enthusiasm that is contagious. The opera has been warmly embraced by critics, opera lovers, and a very diverse and riveted audience.
Powerful theater, alternately hilarious and moving. While the American musical wheezes its way toward extinction, American opera leaps and shouts.
Like Harvey Milk the man, it's a big-hearted, feisty, in-your-face kind of event. Michael Korie's marvelous libretto is truly among the sharpest and most accomplished I have encountered in contemporary opera. Wallace's score -- a jubilantly eclectic mix of the American musical vernacular, both high and decidedly low-brow -- powers us (bags of percussion) through times which are a changin'.
This is a potent creation, inspirational as the subject demands. Korie's stunning libretto, by turns haunting and hilarious, brassy and mystically poetic, is a magnificent creation.
Harvey Milk is an unflinching in-your-face kind of opera, a work that examines not only Milk's tragedy but the awakening of gay consciousness in America.
Nothing quite like it has ever been done before. For its aesthetics as well as its politics, the opera gets a standing ovation from me.
Harvey Milk is dynamic, polystylistic, sentimental, groovy, political and fun.
Spellbinding...The opera remembers well and deeply, and now with a power that augers its own remembrance. It warrants playing in opera houses everywhere. One of the company's highest achievements.
The bravest contemporary opera of them all.
Much of the work's power resides in Wallace's music. Milk and White each have effective arias, and there's a wonderful love duet for Milk and his lover Scott. During the final scene, the opening lines of the Kaddish, the Aramaic prayer of praise recited by Jews in mourning, are set so radiantly that one wishes Wallace would set the whole thing as a stand-alone choral work.
The music encompasses anger, triumph, and an unforgettable choral Kaddish for the slain. Christopher Alden's production is phantasmagorically near perfect.
An evening both savvy and snazzy. The second act is totally brilliant.
A remarkably frank portrayal -- by turns unsettling, contentious and hilarious -- of what it meant to be gay in America between the late 1940's and the late 70's.
Harvey Milk is an opera for our time. And as for future generations, the hell with 'em. Let them write their own operas.
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