There’s no shortage of things to do in Park City in the summer. If anything, the challenge is fitting it all in. That’s because Park City is many things at once: a mountain escape, a foodie’s paradise, a trailhead, and a destination for art, music, and boutique shopping. 

Here are the best things to do in Park City this summer, ranging from events worth planning ahead for to spur-of-the-moment activities.

If you open a certain cabinet in my parents’ house, you might find all of the books that my sisters and I read in school. For some well-known titles, you’ll find multiple editions of those books: take Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. I count: a Bantam Classics edition (mine from middle school), a Folger Shakespeare Library edition (my sister’s from high school), and an Oxford Shakespeare edition (mine from college). For such a well-known work, even though the source material is about 430 years old, we have multiple modern editions that present different critical commentary and illuminate how different folios or manuscript sources have contributed to our current understanding of the text. In other words, even a work as familiar as Romeo and Juliet does not exist in just one fixed form.

Last month, I sat down with Nicole Heinen and Patrick Bessenbacher, who I will direct in the title roles of Park City Opera’s production of Roméo et Juliette. We discussed their characters, their relationship to Shakespeare’s play, and their thoughts about the opera ahead of our August 2026 performances in Park City.

The opera industry spends so much energy debating how to attract new audiences. Mostly, the conversation tends to orbit around the work itself: should we commission a new opera, present an updated staging, modernize the supertitles, or aim for a shorter run time? Yes. All worth doing at times, but these companies rarely spend time thinking about where they will stage their productions. Many of them have permanent, world-class venues! As a new company without a dedicated opera house, one question we were more attracted to was: does where you stage an opera change what opera is?

When we founded Park City Opera just two years ago, we spent months meeting with community leaders and arts organizations that we admired. After we had asked our questions (mostly about community building, filing for 501(c)(3) status, ticketing software of choice etc.), inevitably they would say something along the lines of, “Opera is the most challenging artform to produce; are you sure you want to do this?” We would smile and say, “Producing the opera? That’s the easy part.”

In a whirlwind 12 days between first rehearsal and closing three performances, our team of seven singers, fourteen instrumentalists, one conductor (myself!), and many more behind-the-scenes absolutely relished the process of mounting David Conte’s The Gift of the Magi in December 2025.