The 20th anniversary revival of Richard Foreman and Michael Gordon‘s What to Wear at the PROTOTYPE Festival showcases a fabulous ensemble.
Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Hildegard gives the Middle Ages the Bridgerton treatment at the Prototype Festival.
Dan Johnson on the unique voice of Hildegard composer Sarah Kirkland Snider — and why some music could only ever be written by a woman.
Dan Johnson gives an inside look at the creation of Sarah Kirkland Snider‘s rapturous new opera Hildegard which opens at New York’s PROTOTYPE Festival next week.
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
In the “tormented writers’” room, two actors in goth makeup and bride-of-Frankenstein wigs are clacking on typewriters and throwing crumpled papers on the floor.
Eat the Document, which premiered at the Prototype Festival last week, compresses a decades-long, nonlinear story into a swift 90 minutes while still finding time to pause for reflection.
It was an unexpected tone for the cold stone and moody ambiance of the catacombs—an odd juxtaposition that I’m not sure really worked.
Two months ago, when climate activists interrupted a performance of Tannhaüser at the Met, the banners they unfurled from the balconies announced, “no opera on a dead planet.”
The beginning of Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Adoration is marked by silence. The young Simon, played by Sammy Ivany, lies on his stomach, scribbling in a notebook.
Angel Island seemed a piece with two simultaneous goals: to musically interpret the poetry of Angel Island detainees and to educate its audience on the history of Asian and particularly Chinese immigration to America.
We constantly wonder whether the young man will embrace him—or slit his throat.
A nonstop flow of COVID related announcements from New York City performing arts organizations has swept the city the past weeks.
Despite the ongoing pandemic and the political upheaval, the Prototype Festival is back, and it is bigger and more accessible than ever before.
The Murder of Halit Yozgat by Ben Frost and Petter Ekmann is flavorsome in its use of sound, vocal and otherwise, to explore the elements of the story, to keep you tied in, and guessing.
Ultimately, the unrelenting grimness of the subject matter allied to the sameness of the vocal writing made for a wearying evening.
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.
Cellist Leah Coloff’s one-woman cabaret act ThisTree finds its place among a lineup of Prototype Festival miniatures this week that seem to plumb the depths of womanly distress.
While 4.48 Psychosis is an intricately-crafted, deeply moving portrait of human agony, Pancho Villa from a Safe Distance lacks the creative clout to realize its artistic ambitions.
Though barely a week old, 2019 has already provided New Yorkers with an essential, breathtaking music drama focusing on two women struggling for their very survival.
Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America provides ample fodder for the legions of amateur opera sleuths seeking to confirm their theory of “Who Killed City Opera?”
There is some difficulty in describing just what IYOV the musical occasion is—and I’ll take refuge in calling it a musical work in the current PROTOTYPE Festival.
Composer Gregory Spears is a unique example of this maxim that one must be “deeply rooted in tradition in order to innovate with integrity.”
The aesthetic vision of M. Lamar’s Funeral Doom Spiritual was undeniable.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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