“To close its season this week, New York City Opera is unleashing hurricane-force gales of laughter…. Périchole isn’t just the jolliest opera in town; for sheer fun, it could hold its own against Broadway’s best.” [New York Post]
“Russian children’s ombudsman Pavel Astakhov called upon the newly appointed culture minister to check a Russian-British opera production for sex and drug scenes…. “The staging is about a boy who was raped by a pedophile teacher. Having smoked a cigarette with marijuana, he falls into a dream and recalls the past.” [The Moscow News]
“Zombies are impossible to escape these days — on television, film, video games, even reworkings of Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). And now New York City Opera has given us a “Così Fan Tutte” starring the undead.” [New York Post]
The ENO was filled with ghosts last week. Spectral, possibly illusory figures fleetingly materialized in the Internet chatrooms that provide the setting for much of Nico Muhly’s new opera Two Boys, and brutal boarding school memories came back to troubled life in director Christopher Alden’s dark take on Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Cher Public