the making of 'Dead Man Walking, which aired on PBS on January 14, 2002.) Heggie wrote roles for her in two more of his operas: she starred as the celebrated actor Madeline Mitchell in Three Decembers (originally titled Last Acts) in Houston (2008), at the University of California, Berkeley (2008) and in Hawaii (house debut 2017), and she was the music teacher and philanthropist Winnie Flato in Great Scott in Dallas (2015) and San Diego (2016). Musical theatre Von Stade does not regret her decision to pursue a career in opera rather than in musicals: she knows that if she had been a Broadway singer, she would have had to perform daily rather than just two or three times a week, and she is thankful that she was spared the injury to family life that such an onerous routine entails. Nevertheless, she has never lost the love of musical theatre that took root in her as a child, when the brassy sound of a Broadway band could excite her almost to the point of making her pass out. "I wanted Broadway more than anything," she says. "My heart is on Broadway." "My idea of dying and going to heaven is walking in a Broadway theatre and hearing the overture." When the commercial success of Bernstein's operatically cast recording of West Side Story proved that there was a market for musical theatre albums sung by the likes of José Carreras and Kiri Te Kanawa, she was happy to avail herself of the crossover opportunities that Deutsche Grammophon's experiment had opened up for her. The first came in the summer of 1987, when EMI spent half a million dollars recording John McGlinn's musicologically rigorous version of Jerome Kern's Show Boat. As a little girl, she had dressed up in her mother's clothes and sat on her mother's piano to sing "Bill", but EMI cast her not as Julie LaVerne but in the dual roles of Magnolia Hawkes and the adult Kim Ravenal. A Granada Television film, The Show Boat Story, documented the making of the album (although it glossed over the project's loss of Willard White, who decided to reject EMI's offer of the role of Joe because of McGlinn's refusal to censor Oscar Hammerstein's use of what is now conventionally known as the N-word). In 1990, von Stade returned to Show Boat in Flicka and Friends: From Rossini to Show Boat,