MasterVoices presents a strongly-cast Sweet Smell of Success—but the merits of this noir musical are hardly black or white.
I confess to being a “bad” dance fan: over the decades I’ve learned that if I don’t love (or at least like) the music, I won’t love the dance.
Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, presented at Carnegie Hall this past Wednesday by MasterVoices, is a charming rom-com that pits the feminine world of nature against masculine government with unabashedly silly and utterly delightful results.
Why did Ted Sperling and MasterVoices choose to perform an old warhorse like Carmen which has been produced almost continuously over decades just up the street at Lincoln Center?
Despite a star-studded cast, last night’s Anyone Can Whistle at Carnegie Hall ultimately failed to take flight.
Faith. The title of this fourth and final chapter of Adam Guettel’s Myths and Hymns made me pause for reflection.
“Spring has sprung,” announces MasterVoices’ director Ted Sperling with a smile at the beginning of Part III. And indeed, even the doomsayers among us (and I count myself one) can’t help but feel signs of cautious optimism, as the world we knew slowly but noticeably begins to re-emerge.
The opera’s radical vision lay in its enormous scale, which encompassed a hundred-strong community chorus taken from the ranks of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and Master Voices.
Even the hit songs in this early Jule Styne musical would recede in a better show.
In the most hectic and sometimes marvelous year of theater I’ve had in memory, Lady in the Dark at MasterVoices this weekend thrilled me most.
Four fine Handel-centric concerts from the Morgan Library to Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center proved a bracing antidote to pervasive Messiah-mania.
While one sympathized with Matthew Aucoin’s urge to add his voice to the Orpheus canon it was difficult to figure out how his work complemented Gluck’s.
A semi-staging of Dido and Aeneas starring Broadway divas and frequent collaborators Kelli O’Hara and Victoria Clark seemed a screwy idea at best.
On her 90th birthday “Trove Thursday” presents the late great Belgian mezzo Rita Gorr parenting Régine Crespin in Massenet’s Hérodiade.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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