Trouble in paradise
The New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players‘s vivacious music making compensates for uninspired storytelling in their staging of Utopia, Limited.
Gilbert and Sullivan
10 pieces since 2010.
10
pieces
17
years
Change my mind about performing operetta in English
I so don’t get why any company in the Anglophone world ever bothers to perform Continental operetta in English.
By Last Castrato
139 comments
Turkish sound bath
A brilliant L’italiana in Algeri in Rome has Larry Wolff once again thinking about “singing Turks”
Dueling duels
Mr. Wilson’s production concept, according to his liner notes, has more to do with Paris at the time of the premiere and a “world of memory” than it does with the storytelling of civil war in medieval Spain.
The lion king
Opéra Royal revives Grétry’s Richard Cœur-de-lion, one of the finest examples of the opéra comique genre.
The Importance of Being Rudolph
Since Gilbert and Sullivan remain constant in the light-opera repertory, somewhere between Fledermaus and Les Mis in popular esteem, there must be good reasons their final collaboration, The Grand Duke, is seldom revived.
With a little bit of Gluck
The best joke in Offenbach’s delicious Orphée aux Enfers is the opening premise: Orphée and Eurydice are miserably married, due to her utter boredom with his old-fashioned music.
One from the vault
There has never been a successful vampire musical—so they say. But that’s just not true.
One more “Kiss”
The Poisoned Kiss derives its plot from the legend of the girl raised on poison so that her very kiss will kill.
The bad and the beautiful
Packaged with a peek-a-boo cover exposing only Bryn Terfel’s lovely left eye (the effect of turning the page to reveal the Welsh bass-baritone’s head in its entirety brings to mind this Encyclopedia Dramatica entry) and an oddly hip-hop-flavored gray-on-black treatment of the album’s title, Terfel’s Bad Boys seems designed for those who like their divos […]
I’ll take the fall
The days are getting shorter, but you can keep the prattle going this fall’s Talk of the Town! You will, you can, you must join in the discussion about: Great mezzo soprano performances (October),
Gained in translation (November), Teleport me back to… (December).