I reckon marketing a sex-themed opera in Brooklyn should be like selling bacon-flavored froyo in Vermont.
From up close, the miked opera singer can be a bit tough to take.
A poster outside Carnegie Hall proclaimed “Mahler Well Met” and to some degree it proved to be true.
In the same season that Manhattan School of Music revived The Gypsy Baron, Riverside Theater around the corner is the site of Amore Opera’s “Season of Gypsy Operas.”
Diana Damrau has chosen for her new Erato recital disc Grand Opera 11 high-flying showpieces from ten operas by Giacomo Meyerbeer.
Cio-Cio and Carmen: what do you do with two tragic heroines who typify not just the sexist clichés, but also the soupy exotic fixations, of the Old-World West?
The Broad Stage presented Joseph Calleja in their Celebrity Opera Series May 10 with a concert called A Tribute to Mario Lanza.
Zolotoy pyetushok (translated as The Golden Cockerel in English, is best known in these parts as Le Coq d’Or.
If everything you see is great, you are either new to opera or chronically easy to please.
The cultiest of cult musicals, an All-American take on the Iliad and the Odyssey, the spectacularly witty Golden Apple of John Latouche (words) and Jerome Moross (music), opened Off Broadway in 1953 to some acclaim.
Anticipation of events like the Metropolitan Opera’s 50th Anniversary bash turns me back into the newly opera-soused kid who begged his parents to let him watch the highlights of the Bing Gala on the family color television.
Going into Washington National Opera’s final presentation of the season, Madama Butterfly, I feared that I might be geisha’d out.
W.C. Fields used to have a funny trope about in show business you should never work with children or animals. To that list should perhaps be added the soprano Anna Netrebko.
Antonio Literes, a boy soprano from Majorca, had, we may presume, friends in high places.
Were La Rondine an IQ test, I’d be in trouble.
By virtue of its subject matter and the auspicious occasion of its commissioning, Louis Riel was destined to be iconic.
“Roberto Alagna has found his most congenial and emotionally moving role yet: Cyrano de Bergerac.”
It is much to be regretted that song recitalists stick to the tried, the true, the excessively familiar when the repertory of song is so vast, so full of treasures ready for the light
Only the grand forces of Lyric Opera could bring such power and life to this production of My Fair Lady.
Opera Philadelphia ended its season with Le Nozze di Figaro, Friday, and it will play May 3, 5, and 7—a matinee. Figaro is considered by most to be one of the few perfect operas and although it’s perhaps too easily encountered in routine run-throughs, there are usually rewards in seeing it.
I don’t usually attend a performance of an opera I’ve known well most of my life expecting a revelation.
It was a timeout—but maybe it was a timeout we deserved.
In The Gypsy Baron (Der Zigeunerbaron), currently (through Sunday) enjoying a revival by the Manhattan School of Music Opera Theater, you get Strauss waltzes and patriotic marches.
Not a few eyebrows arched on social media when L.A. Opera appropriated the hashtag “Fight like a girl” on street level poster adverts all over town for the revival of their 2013 production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca.
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
