How do you like your Shakespeare? Intimate. Intelligent. Intrepid. And, I’d also add fully integrated through emotional truth and delivery of the musical richness of Shakespeare’s language. Taffety Punk has made just about all of that happen with the return of its all female “band,” Riot Grrrls, starring in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, […]
Review: La Vida es Sueño / Life is a Dream at GALA Hispanic Theatre
Never underestimate the power of a classic to communicate across time, cultures, and language in new and urgent messaging. We have Producing Artistic Director Hugo Medrano, the longest serving Artistic Director of a company in Washington’s now crowded field of professional theatres, to thank for bringing us this work from Spain’s Golden Age. He directs […]
Review: Butterfly takes wing. Timothy Nelson has rescued Puccini’s most famous opera
Every age gets to reassess the value of a work of art relative to its present times, and not just aesthetically but politically. Never more so than today. Sometimes in our society’s self-congratulating political correctness this comes on with a vengeance; a work gets excoriated, bashed in, and thrown on the artistic ash heap. But […]
Review: New Jeanine Tesori/Tazewell Thompson opera Blue at Glimmerglass Festival
The Glimmerglass Festival offers a unique opportunity to singers and audiences alike to be around living composers. The “live relationship” creates a work that breathes and where new discoveries in the process can bring about further growth and development. This has happened with having composer John Corigliano as artist-in-residence all summer serving as mentor to […]
Review: The Ghosts of Versailles at Glimmerglass Festival 2019
Glimmerglass Festival has made a bold choice in re-mounting The Ghosts of Versailles, a complicated, multi-layered late 20th-century opera, as part of its 2019 season. Contemporary opera tends to suffer through an unusually difficult and long gestation before it is brought into this world. The Ghosts of Versailles is no exception. Commissioned with the team […]
Review: Elvis Costello’s opera, The Juliet Letters
UrbanArias’ Artistic Director Robert Wood continues to push the envelope of what makes for contemporary opera. In Elvis Costello, the famous Brit pop singer/song writer, he has found a composer with ranging musical sensibilities and seemingly an inexhaustible and quirky curiosity about how to tell stories of the human heart through song in The Juliet […]
Review: The Band’s Visit at The Kennedy Center
The Band’s Visit shows why it’s a multiple Tony Award winner in its stop at The Kennedy Center and is a welcoming respite from the big-bigger-biggest splashiness of a typical Broadway musical. It’s a show that grabs your heart with the most unlikely thing in the world of showbiz: economy of means. Plot line, staging, […]
Capital Fringe review: Love in the Time of Climate Change
Rozina Kanchwala nails it: we in the U.S. live in a world of too many choices, where a girl can just ask Google to serve up a song instantly to match her mood. It’s a time when everyone is so busy doing whatever they do in their lives (and scrolling through their iPhone apps,) there’s […]
Review: Show Boat at Glimmerglass Festival
Glimmerglass Festival opened its 45th season with a sensational Show Boat. The musical, based on Edna Ferber’s novel about a floating theater on the Mississippi, could have been delivered as just a slice of Americana and even get sweetly sentimental under less capable hands. But Artistic Director Francesca Zambello has dug deeply into this enormously […]
Review: La traviata at Glimmerglass Festival
A “new” production of La traviata shared the buzz opening weekend at Glimmerglass Festival. Nonetheless, as a co-production with Washington National Opera (and a handful of other opera companies because this is how opera sustains itself these days,) it was seen first at the Kennedy Center last Fall as its season’s gala opening. My review […]
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