The eventually reopened Metropolitan Opera promises a swift return to its status quo ante as a farm team for the English National Opera, sharing the London company’s new Ring cycle directed by vieillard terrible Richard Jones.
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“Gelb said the Ring probably will return in five or six years…”
At the Metropolitan Opera’s Götterdämmerung on Saturday afternoon, the fires which consumed the Gods burned lukewarm.
The “the ‘most authentic aspect of Lepage’s production is the overall failure of its illusionist agenda.”
“Robert Lepage‘s direction of a crucial scene in the Ring is even worse than Otto Schenk‘s, if such a thing is possible.”
Much like Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which launched the Met’s 2016-2017 season, Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin is an opera about love and death.
After five flops in a row, Mr. McVicar continues to win new assignments from the Met.
So finally we can see what the Robert Lepage Ring would have looked like if only the Machine hadn’t been totally fucked.
The next scheduled appearance of the Met’s Ring production has been canceled, as irrevocably as these things can ever be.
La Cieca is always delighted when Met stars “cross over” into more popular genres of entertainment.
Last night, La Cieca finally got around to watching that documentary about the rocky road to the new Ring at the Met, and she has a thought or two about this whole brouhaha.
So, take a look after the jump and tell La Cieca the two things that are wrong (they’re related) about the cover of the Met’s new Ring DVD/Blu-ray.
The Met’s controversial Ring cycle, directed by Robert Lepage (not pictured) and conducted by TBA (possibly pictured) makes its home video debut on September 11.
The Robert Lepage production of the Ring cycle will be shown complete (including the now de rigueur fifth part of the pentalogy, Wagner’s Dream) September 11-14 on PBS
You can call Robert Lepage many things (and the critics have!), but one thing you cannot call him is “inflexible.”
To kick off this week’s intermission feature, cher public, La Cieca invites you to imagine who said what to whom to make two legendary ladies laugh so lustily?
“The Met’s new Ring is the most frustrating opera production I have ever had to grapple with.”
It turns out we were wrong all along, cher public: the Robert Lepage production of the Ring at the Met is in fact a triumph.
Zachary Woolfe went to Las Vegas and all we got was a thoughtful analysis of why Robert Lepage was never a good fit for the Ring.
A phrase no one ever thought to see in print…
“Pound for pound, ton for ton, it is the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history.”
Leave it to those Torontonians to blow the lid off an opera story happening in New York! (Goodness knows the local journalists don’t bother.)
“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…
Those lucky few of you who manage to scare up tickets to the Met’s second Ring cycle of the spring ($3,500 top) will no doubt want to start crossing your fingers now that nothing goes wrong with “The Machine” at the “prologue-evening” Das Rheingold April 26.
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