Based on the East Coast, Gale is an award-winning writer on the performing arts, books, literature and popular culture. She has just published Don Juan in Hankey and you can read her Operatoonity blog. Her articles have appeared in numerous anthologies.
Bravo to Opera Phila for presenting a startlingly beautiful contemporary operatic work by Osvaldo Golijov, one that's vital in the evolving landscape of 21st century opera.
The latest production of Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia gave the audience lots to marvel at musically – beautiful composition and gorgeous voices.
What is it about Mozart’s Così fan tutte that inspires the zaniest interpretations? While the music is lovely, replete with all those lush trios, quartets, and quintets that operagoers live for, the storyline is silly if not downright insipid.
During Verdi’s bicentenary month and year, it’s fitting that Opera Philadelphia kicked off its 2013/14 season with the work that Verdi himself considers as having launched his own career – Nabucco. Written at a time when Italy longed to be free of foreign rule, Verdi’s name and the expression “Viva Verdi” became synonymous with Italian nationalism and unification.
The third production to launch this year at Glimmerglass Festival is a pairing of two one-act operas spanning four centuries, entitled Passions for expediency’s sake. Presented in one bill, the works couldn’t be more different in style, presentation, and audience appeal, but they ultimately combine to make a unique and important artistic statement about suffering and love.
What does any theatergoer want from a stage musical? For starters, beautiful singing, solid acting, striking costumes, clever direction, and characters to love and to loathe. A melodic score with a few toe-tappers and a smart book and lyrics. The new production of Camelot presented at the Glimmerglass Festival is that theatergoer’s dream – a crowning glory, a royal treat.
If an evocative and provocative crowd-pleaser is your preferred summertime fare, then catch the new production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman at Glimmerglass Festival.Dutchman was Wagner’s first unabashed hit, deservedly so. It is a classic tale of redemption through love, masterfully scored, inspired by a stormy voyage the composer himself made and Heinrich Heine’s retelling of the legend.
Take four very talented performers. Throw in a score that pushes them to their vocal limits. Add an accordion and a fishing reel to the orchestra. Mix with a healthy dose of wry humor. Dot with ostrich features in Mary Kay pink. Simmer with sexual innuendo for two hours and eleven minutes.
“For some operas,” famed conductor Carlo Maria Giulini once said, “you can accept a voice of not absolute beauty – if it is well used and he is an artist and interpreter, it will work. But for Verdi you need all this plus the essential sound.
Not a new production, the Metropolitan Opera’s staging of Dialogues des Carmélites, originally directed by John Dexter in 1977, was nonetheless fresh and compelling in its approach and not at all tired, despite its age.
As the legend goes, a noble cavalier loses his battle with giant windmills. But the Academy of Vocal Arts wins big with their latest production, Jules Massenet’s melodic Don Quichotte.
For the first time in twenty-five years, the Opera Company of Philadelphia has mounted a production of Puccini’s first great opera, Manon Lescaut. The result was an inspired testament to thoughtful direction by Michael Cavanagh, gorgeous sets and costumes by John Pascoe, and several winning performances.
The plight of women trapped in plural marriage—one husband with multiple wives—glowed like a firebrand on the Perelman Theater stage on Sunday. Opera Company of Philadelphia’s Dark Sisters, in co-production with Gotham Chamber Opera and the Music-Theatre Group, is OCP’s final offering of the 2011-12 season.
A work crucial to the development and appreciation of opera as a relevant modern art form premièred on the East Coast to well-deserved acclaim at a legendary Philadelphia venue. From the first note out of the pit orchestra to the final strains of the last act, Silent Night, presented by Opera Philadelphia at the Academy of Music, was a tour de force – from conception to execution.
Never has the expression “A good time was had by all” been more accurate than at Tuesday night’s performance Il Barbiere di Siviglia at Centennial Hall in Haverford, Pennsylvania.
Want to know what small-town America looks and feels like in the thick of summertime, circa 1940? The Glimmerglass Festival’s purest musical theater offering, The Music Man, is festive, frolicsome Americana, brimming with spectacular sets, clever staging, and a sensational ensemble showcasing Olympic-sized talent.
You won’t see plumed horses, a procession of camels, or a hundred supernumeraries as standard bearers parading across the Glimmerglass stage. In fact, you have to step outside the Alice Busch Opera Theater to see any elephants at all, the animal most commonly associated with Aida, Verdi’s greatest grand opera.
The seldom-seen opera musical Lost in the Stars found prominence Friday night, enrapturing a full house at Glimmerglass Festival in New York, moving some of the actors themselves to tears, and stirring the audience to its feet for curtain call.
Most Americans are ashamed of the legacy of the Ku Klux Klan in this country and their lawless persecution of non-whites. Racism in America is not a pretty subject, and it doesn’t make for pretty opera. It does, however, make for a thought-provoking and even disturbing piece in the hands of Philadelphia’s Center City Opera Theater (CCOT).
Though most of Gaetano Donizetti’s operas are not well known, Donizetti wrote dozens of them – many of the silly variety. L’Elisir d’Amore is one frothy work that not only survived, but continues to be performed around the world – frequently. L’Elisir d’Amore has a formulaic storyline: it’s war time (pick a war, any war). A lonely boy falls for a very pretty girl.
