Our Own JJ has been spending a lot of time outdoors lately, which is such a novelty for him that he felt he really must write about it.
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Our Own JJ once again is dipping his toe into light entertainment, writing and directing a cabaret act for his old, old, old friend Dorothy Bishop.
“About the only good thing that can be said for New York City Opera’s Orpheus, which opened Saturday night, is that it made the rest of the company’s feeble season seem scintillating by comparison.”
This Billy Budd would have worked better with a stronger set of singers.
Some days you can feel like a hero just getting out of bed in the morning.
An understudy saved the show at the Met’s La Traviata Friday night, but no star was born.
“Since no opera company in the U.S. has quite got up the courage to present a Herheim production, this webcast offers us a chance to sample this director’s unique style of Regie.”
When the hard-partying heroine of Massenet’s Manon hits bottom, she literally lands in the gutter.
Now New York City Opera has given us a “Così Fan Tutte” starring the undead.
When Verdi’s Macbeth returned to the Met Thursday night, miscasting doomed the revival as surely as any witch’s curse.
“Juan Diego Flórez made an untraditional Nemorino, his small but diamond-bright tenor unlike the luscious lyric voice usually heard in this part.”
“In a season of high-profile duds like Don Giovanni and the Ring, the Met has found a winner in a dark horse, Mussorgsky’s moody Khovanshchina.”
“With Anjelica Huston, Parker Posey and Yoko Ono dotting the crowd at BAM Sunday afternoon, the New York City Opera’s premiere of Prima Donna offered more diva presence offstage than on.”
“No tenors, no arias, no orchestra pit, no plot. Can You, My Mother really be called an opera?”
Our Own JJ gets into the traditional holiday mood, journalist style, by cobbling together a listicle of last-minute shopping options. [New York Post]
“In an unlikely venue—a converted gymnasium off Avenue B—one of New York’s newest opera companies is keeping musical tradition alive.” [New York Post]
“An atomic explosion kicked off the last act of Gounod’s Faust Tuesday at the Met, but the production as a whole was more dud than bomb.” [New York Post]
“Now that it has become apparent that Robert Lepage‘s production of the Ring at the Met is a fiasco (too soon? Nah.)… well, anyway, since arguably the production is a dreary, unworkable, overpriced mess whose primary (perhaps only) virtue is that it actually hasn’t killed anyone yet, and since, let’s face it, the Machinecentric show turned out to be so mind-bogglingly…
Now, it seems, OONY is returning to its star-driven roots.
Open your eyes, sleepyheads! In the news this morning, our own JJ raves about Satyagraha at the Met (“a masterpiece of musical and visual art”); the ever-articulate Nico Muhly takes aim at the Met’s production values (“Mercedes Bass or Anne Ziff paid for the opera. What do you think is going to happen?”); and NYCO’s…
“’I’ve almost come to the conclusion that this Mr. Hitler isn’t a Christian,’ muses merry murderess Abby Brewster early in the first act of Arsenic and Old Lace, and to tell the truth I’m beginning to think I’m almost as far behind the curve as she was. Recent new productions at the Met suggest strongly…
Composer Nico Muhly took a break between operatic world premieres to order a daiquiri and talk to our own JJ about height, haters and flight path. [Capital New York] (Photo: Peter Ross)
“It’s the understudy’s job to save the show, and that’s just what Jay Hunter Morris did Thursday at the Met in the daunting title role of Wagner’s Siegfried.” [New York Post]
So, tell me this, what do Anthony Tommasini, Zachary Woolfe and James Jorden (not pictured) have in common? Well, according to John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute Heather MacDonald, these three “trendy” critics constitute “a press corps determined to push Met general manager Peter Gelb into conformity with European opera houses, where narcissistic…
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