It was a rare pleasure to share the stage at the Smithsonian Institution’s S. Dillon Ripley Center less than a week ago with colleagues who are also in the business of reviewing the performing arts. I have always thought Washington would be better served and advance an even more robust and renowned theatre scene if […]
Opera review: Glory Denied, a heartbreaking story of the Vietnam War and its aftermath
For many of us in the audience of UrbanArias’ new production, Glory Denied, the Vietnam War is not distant history. Like the characters in this opera by Tom Cipullo, we carry that war inside us and move back and forth seamlessly but relentlessly between our current feelings and memories of who we were and how […]
Review: Three new operas showcased in WNO’s AOI Festival 2020. Is the development process working?
2020 marks the 8th year of Washington National Opera’s showcase of new compositional teams working in the most specialized art form of opera in a rollout of three twenty-minute operas. It’s clearly a much-needed service. Opera companies across the country are searching to develop new talent but, even more, to attract younger audiences. Most of […]
Review: Le Cabaret de Carmen. In Series kick-starts the new decade with an LGBTQ Carmen
In 1981, the once enfant terrible of stage and screen, Peter Brook, then seasoned into arguably the most formidable theatre director in the world, took the opera world by storm with his radical production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen. In Series Artistic Director Timothy Nelson is going for the same – re-visioning a Carmen for our […]
Review: Bartlett Sher’s My Fair Lady, a fresh, loverly production with a curiously unsatisfying end
Everyone has a special memory of their first musical. Mine was My Fair Lady. It had opened in London in 1958 on Drury Lane after taking Broadway by storm, and, as a young child living there, I already knew the tunes when I was taken to see Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison. Last night as […]
Review: I Take Your Hand in Mine. Anton Chekhov in love
I Take Your hand in Mine is based on the intimate letters written between Anton Chekhov at the end of his life and his wife Olga Knipper. It has come to the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop in the busiest holiday season and for the briefest of runs, but don’t lose the opportunity to see this […]
Review: The 2019 Christmas Revels: Celestial Fools
When singer/musician/educator John Langstaff launched a seasonal celebration of early music in Boston back in 1971, comprised of song and general merriment that would bring community together and keep at bay the bleak, shortest days of winter, did he ever imagine it would become a tradition, indeed an industry, that would take over nine cities […]
Review: Keep. A brilliant theatrical tour de force at Studio Theatre
Make no mistake about it, I had this guy pegged in the first two minutes: a bumbling, bald-headed bungler trying to string together a show based on his own hoarding. Worse, an amateur! My companion was noticeably shifting in his seat, beginning to snort, and looking for an egress. Writer and performer Daniel Kitson seemed […]
Review: Venus and Adonis from Opera Lafayette
Celebrating Opera Lafayette’s twenty-fifth season, Ryan Brown has brought a rare and truly exquisite small gem of an opera to Washington audiences. To do so, Brown has left his more familiar continental excavations of early operatic repertoire and jumped the Channel to England to the court of Charles II where, in John Blow’s composition, he […]
Review: HEARTSPACE the earth that is sufficient from The Welders
How are we to recover from what divides us? How do we maintain hope in the face of catastrophe from climate crisis? Such questions are not new; in fact the clamor of them pounding for our attention has so dominated our conversation and full-throttled crashed into our current existential angst it’s almost deafening. However, Annalisa […]
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