For my 2014 retrospective, I’ve chosen two shows from the past year that are returning in 2015 and that really shouldn’t be missed by NY-based-and-visiting parterriani.

An Octoroon. This was the best show I saw in 2014 and I’m really glad it’s returning for another run. Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has taken a seemingly unrevivable melodrama from 1861 by Dion Boucicault called The Octoroon and made it the basis of a stunning play. This work digs through the artifice, coincidences, vicious stereotypes, plot contrivances and mustache-twirling to find genuine pain, heartbreak, and unhealed racial wounds.

The author and director, Sarah Benson, have some special surprises in store for those audience members who think the only way to appreciate a melodrama is to snark at it.

I wish a creative team would apply a similar approach for Il Trovatore and show the racial suffering and abuse that make Azucena’s hysteria more than just an easy target for know-it-all directors. While we’re at it, I wish a golem in the form of Joseph Kerman would smite any critic that insists that the plot of Il Trovatore is claptrap.

Fun Home. Composer Jeanine Tesori’s career has generated lots of fodder for the pedants who like to draw bright lines between musicals and operas. This piece is, I believe, her best work, whichever genre you want to slot it into. The work, based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel packs an operatic emotional wallop, and even has a mad scene!

Tesori and her gifted librettist/lyricist Lisa Kron deal with the discovery of one’s sexuality with creativity and insight. The piece is smart without being clever and devastating without being cloying, that is to say it is the antithesis of whatever Jeremy Sams is likely to inflict on The Merry Widow. This will cleanse you of all that slimy residue.

As far as the Met was concerned my highlight of the current season was arguing with anti-Klinghoffer protesters outside Lincoln Center.

Dawn Fatale

Richard Lynn is a New York City based opera lover who writes at parterre box under the name Dawn Fatale. His love of opera started at a very young age when he used to listen to the Met broadcasts and obsessively read back issues of Opera News in lieu of socializing at family gatherings. In college, he majored in Chemistry while taking as many music and theater courses as possible. He worked at the Music Library to get access to the opera recordings that were off limits to undergraduates. Since the early 1990s he has been writing about opera at parterre box and other publications and is particularly interested the evolution of staging and performance practices.

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