Reduce, reuse, recycle
Global warming meets the cool factor in The Seasons.
Mimi Lien
10 pieces since 2011 — at 4 companies, most often at Bard Festival.
10
pieces
4
companies
16
years
The turning point
The Comet/Poppea at this summer’s Running AMOC* festival at Lincoln Center is a thrilling, startling, deeply moving experience
Sexual orientalization
An impressive cast blurs binaries as John Adams‘s ambitious Antony and Cleopatra arrives at the Met
Perspectives, reflections, obscurity, and illusion
Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann‘s opera at the Prototype Festival re-sets Rashomon in the Pacific Northwest and binds its characters into a hellish cycle of violence with a dark, hypnotic score
Nosedive
It’s not so much that I hated the Met Opera’s Grounded. I’m just not convinced that it should have been an opera.
Assault and battery
Jay Scheib’s Augmented-Reality Parsifal is a cautionary reminder that technological innovation shouldn’t absolve directors from the exacting work of deriving intelligent and fascinating theater from the source material.
Crying ‘Uncle’
Surely it was lightning in a bottle. The announcement that Steve Carell would appear at Lincoln Center’s Beaumont Theater playing the titular Uncle Vanya in Anton Chekhov’s classic play would, of course, be a box office windfall.
Soar, losers
Chopping up the action and dutifully showing each plot point may work in a film but in an opera, where every piece of marginal dialogue must be set to music, it feels like a chore.
Classic example: ‘Antony’ at SFO
Antony and Cleopatra was an auspicious start to San Francisco Opera’s second century, a performance that seems to improve as I continue to think about it.
Gold digger of 2011
It seems a thing incredible but fifty years ago Richard Strauss was regarded as the wunderkind composer of a few tone poems, three notable operas (all produced before the First World War) and then nothing notable during forty years of repetitious senility. Even Ariadne auf Naxos, today one of the most popular works in the […]
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).
Win a Free Ticket to Opening Night at the Met!
Quinn Kelsey and Lise Davidsen star in the Met's new Macbeth. We're giving away one ticket, so screw your courage to the sticking place and enter now!
