Vancouver Opera's just-announced 2015-16 is marked by a couple warhorses, a contemporary opera about polygamy, and the musical Evita.

Giuseppe Verdi's tragedy Rigoletto opens the season from September 26 to October 4, with local star Simone Osborne returning to perform opposite baritone Gordon Hawkins at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

Next up is a chamber opera, the Canadian premiere of composer Nico Muhly's Dark Sisters, about a woman trying to escape a polygamist Mormon sect in the southwestern United States. It play from November 26 to December 12 at the smaller Vancouver Playhouse Theatre (where last year's new opera Stickboy also played). Vancouver's Amiel Gladstone directs. Muhly is the Oscar-nominated talent behind the music of the 2008 movie The Reader.

Giacomo Puccini's classic Madama Butterfly promises to pull in the crowds next spring, from March 5 to 13, 2016, at the Queen E. Soprano Mihoko Kinoshita, for whom Cio Cio San is a defining role, stars, while Michael Cavanagh directs.

And the season wraps with Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita, from April 30 to May 8, 2016. The story of Eva Peron gets a full staging—one in a recent series of seasons featuring musicals and operettas on the VO stage, from The Pirates of Penzance to West Side Story. Sweeney Todd is also scheduled for April 25 to May 3 this year.

The season will also include the school tour of Stickboy, VO's much-buzzed-about opera about bullying, by Neil Weisensel and Shane Koyczan, which had its world premiere in October 2014.

Tickets are available exclusively through www.vancouveropera.ca/.