Annie Levin
With tight, jazzy orchestrations, a queer-coded Mephistopheles, and sassy modern recitative, Heartbeat Opera’s fast 100-minute Faust delivers Gounod in miniature, minus some of the schmaltz.
A feast of whimsy for the recently resurrected in Aaron Siegel’s new opera, Rainbird
A muted and merry carousel ride out of feudalism in the Met’s production of Le nozze di Figaro
Only disordered and volcanic intellects need apply for this beautifully deranged production of Salome from Heartbeat Opera
While the Met’s Mozart-lite holiday production of The Magic Flute kept the eyes entertained with spectacular sets and costumes, the scattershot casting and lack of musical seriousness dragged down this opera for beginners.
This archly traditional production of La bohème was a little shaky on opening night. It nevertheless had a full complement of sterling individual performances to take us on home.
The show, with its high production values and ever so abstract and high-minded Vedic metaphor, presents a nominally innovative performance that points at the avant garde but never quite ventures into challenging territory.
It was as though they had released us from an enchantment and we all woke up giggling and surprisingly well rested.
Two experimental new works from thingNY explore decadence, quarantine, digestion, and lineage at The Exponential Festival.
PRISM Quartet teams up with Tyshawn Sorey, David Krakauer, and a host of some of the finest new music musicians and composers in the nation to create Generate Music: a musical exploration of the ties that bind together Black and Jewish Americans.
Peter Sellars’s rarely radical climate epic Shall We Gather at The River brought together a superb collection of musical talent for an unfortunately incoherent night of sacred song.
There was much to love in Andrew Ousley’s Tiergarten: a three-night cabaret revue from Death of Classical and part of Carnegie Hall’s Weimar Festival, performed in the vaulted gothic hall of the Church of St. Mary.
Life was a Cabaret, you chumps!
Émigré, unfortunately, fails to do justice, either musically or theatrically, to this group of refugees or to the Shanghainese who took them in.
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