The inaugural New Orleans Opera Festival goes big across the Big Easy.
Target Margin Theater proudly boasts that Show/Boat: A River, its small-scale and bare-bones staging of Show Boat (at the Skirball Center on Washington Square through the 26th), is a “bold reimagining” of the classic Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein show, a “new adaptation that explores America’s transformation from the Jim Crow 1880s to the Chicago of the Great Migration to the challenges of today,” but I don’t see it.
During the 1970s, Stephen Sondheim composed Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd–five richly varied masterpieces of musical theater in a nearly miraculous burst of creativity.
Madama Butterfly is the opera of the moment.
On June 16, San Francisco Opera concluded their excellent Centennial Season with a heartfelt 100th Anniversary Concert, featuring a starry cast, three conductors (including current and former Music Directors) and the SF Opera Orchestra and Chorus.
A quick survey of the Met website shows wide swaths of available seats for the upcoming performances of La traviata and L’elisir d’amore. Only new works like The Hours and Fire Shut Up in My Bones have been achieving sold-out houses.
I often think of Boys in the Band as the gay play equivalent of Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat—it’s hugely important in theater history, but the politics have become extremely problematic.
The New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players (NYGASP to its friends) is giving Sullivan’s most operatic score a dusting off (or should one say dusting-up?) at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College.
Weekends at Aura Bar on 53rd and Ninth are typically big money makers for the morons who run the place. Jonjon and Yoni.
You might be surprised, though, when that title turns out to be Show Boat.
If you are of the belief that Show Boat can stand on its own as a classic score and thus doesn’t need the trappings of musical production, you’ll love the New York Philharmonic’s “semi-staged” production.
Soprano star of MGM’s golden age Kathryn Grayson died yesterday. The leading lady of Anchors Aweigh, Show Boat and Kiss Me Kate was 88.
La Cieca received this letter yesterday. If you have reviews, opinion pieces, appreciations, or (as in this case) a Letter to the Doyenne, please email to [email protected]. Saving New York City Opera?
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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