The Cleveland Opera is doing it again. Setting aside mainstream repertoire, it’s producing an opera largely unknown in Northeast Ohio. This Friday and Sunday, at the Tudor Arms Hotel in Cleveland, the company led by Dorota Sobieska will stage Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut,” in collaboration with the Cleveland Women’s Orchestra.

The chamber-style performance will take place in the hotel’s Crystal Ballroom and be led by conductor John Thomas Dodson, the newly appointed principal conductor and artistic advisor of the Women’s Orchestra. “Manon,” penned by Puccini in 1893 and based on a popular 18th-century novel, follows a young woman, Manon, as she chooses love over life in a convent. What appears to be a happy ending with a student named Des Grieux is derailed by a fateful lapse with another man, Geronte.