Political thrillers, love, jealousy, passion, betrayal, murder and war were selling theater tickets years before the Bijou came to Morrisville and long before Cecil B. DeMille arrived in Hollywood. Giacomo Puccini could keep an audience on the edge of their seats long before Alfred Hitchcock could say “Psycho” or Indiana Jones went looking for the Temple of Doom. Now Puccini’s “Tosca” is coming to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.

Set amid the Napoleonic Wars there is a sadistic police chief, Scarpia, who lusts after the Diva of Rome, Tosca. She will have nothing to do with him. She loves the artistic painter Cavaradossi, who is painting Mary Magdalene as a beautiful blonde resembling another of Rome’s femme fatales. Tosca is jealous.