Immersive theater can be vexing—take it from a critic who’s slogged through productions set on sinking long-tail boats and in allergenic warehouses—but this year’s been a grand one for location-specific opera. Read more »
Immersive theater doesn’t do opera singers many favors. Like a photonegative of theatre in the round, it forces performers into an up-close-and-personal relationship with their audience and breaks down the fourth wall, lending most spectators an HD view of everyone’s tonsils. Singing technique, usually kept at a safe distance onstage, is here made loudly, oppressively available. Read more »
If aging French modernist composer Darius Milhaud took a risk in adapting La Mère Coupable as an opera, it wasn’t the quirky, atonal style he used for his score. Read more »
New York City Opera presents the world premiere of Iain Bell and Mark Campbell’s Stonewall. Commemorating the 50th anniversary of the uprising, Stonewall is a moving and explosive new American opera that captures the rage, grit, humor and, finally, hope of the LGBTQ+ community’s uprising in a Greenwich Village dance club on one hot night in June 1969. Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, June 21-28. Read more »
“I thought you did it for me, Mama.” “I thought you did it for me, Mama…” I thought you made a no-talent ox into a star because you like doing things the hard way, Mama. And you haven’t got any talent! Not what I call talent, Mister Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart! I made you! And you wanna know why? You wanna know what I did it for?! Because I was born too soon and started too late, that’s why! [On Site Opera]
>The Crypt Sessions, in collaboration with On Site Opera, presented the world premiere of Gregg Kallor’s The Tell-Tale Heart
An extraordinarily rich variety of opera happens locally, under the umbrella of New York Opera Fest.
Poor Paisiello. Out of the nearly 100 operas written by this industrious composer just one was generally regarded as a masterpiece.
Cher Public