Jesus Daniel Hernandez’ sensational tenor voice has a clarion purity that could fill a cavernous auditorium  and scenic designer Osbel Susman-Pena reinforces that impression by giving him a setting at Source reminiscent of a Greek arena, with raked, semi-circular seating. [Read more...]

I want you to imagine it is 1927; the week after Christmas.  You have bought your tickets, and now your chilly bones sit in a dark corner of Florenz Ziegfeld’s Theater in New York.  The billed show is Show Boat by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II.  But it isn’t starting; it has already begun.  You’ve heard the overture by now, and seen all the major characters; a few musical numbers have gone by as Act I has stretched out like a smooth legato.  [Read more...]

Once more Producing Artistic Director Carla Hubner and her In Series have taken on a double-bill of “pocket opera”. And, as she has in the past, Hubner refuses to be either defined or limited by culture, including language, musical genres, or budget.  [Read more...]

‘Tis the season, and programming holiday fare for adults can either overload us on Sugarplum gooiness or, ignoring the holiday, risk appearing downright Scrooge-like. But Carla Hubner and her company of musical “elves” have conjured up something that is  just the ticket. The show is well-directed and funny, and it’s got both heart and some soulful moments. Best of all, it features the music of Harold Arlen and Irving Berlin. [Read more...]

If you need relief from the news and the economy, here’s an aspirin on an elegant platter. Staged in the elegant mini-opera house of the GALA Tivoli Theatre, the In Series’ Love Potion #1 is a heady hit to ease all headaches. It’s pure escapism, a charming satire of the glorious, well-known comic opera, The Elixir of Love (L’Elisir d’amore).  [Read more...]

After a resounding success in March with WAM2, In Series Artistic Director Carla Hubner takes another daring leap by bringing together the unexpected. Now back on home turf in the more intimate Source theatre space, In Series stages Saudade: Songs of Longing & Celebration, a show for poetry lovers. It is an intimate jazz-Brazz revue that unites performed spoken poetry, a cabaret-style vocalist with an exciting trio of consummate musicians. [Read more...]

A Ballet and Opera Double-Thrill

WAM2! (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) has found an apt locale for making art; not war. It’s upstairs in the Atlas Performing Arts Center, where downstairs the Intersections New America Arts Festival is now running at full tilt. [Read more...]

Take advantage of the brief opportunity to see The In Series’ opera, I Pagliacci.  Even if you don’t know opera you might discover that you are already familiar with one of the best known arias in all of the repertoire, Vesti la giubba, by composer Ruggero Leoncavallo. Joe Banno has directed a pair of “pocket operas” in a fascinating mirroring of artists’ blurring emotional artifice with real life relationships. Like a game of Clue, the operas give us two rounds of murder. Both feature a knife as the murder weapon. And the room where each murder takes place? One sets the deed in a Havana nightclub and the other a restaurant in Little Italy.  (I won’t announce the murderer but it’s not Colonel Mustard.) I will say it’s the opera Pagliacci that really delivers. [Read more...]

Swingtime features the captivating music and style of the 1940’s wrapped in a story that reflects the period’s prevailing cultural themes of discrimination and oppression.  The narrative weaves the songs into an engaging story line, sometimes bumpily, but for the most part effectively, so that the they actually reflect aspects of the characters and propel the action.  [Read more...]

Writers, one could argue, wield the most power out of any of us, since they build and destroy worlds with the flip of a pencil, the turn of a new idea. In Sybil R. Williams’s new play for the In Series, Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral speaks more humbly of her craft. “The people walking on the road, they leave me their stories,” she murmurs, “and I pick them up where they fell.” [Read more...]