Ruth Bader Ginsburg well earned the sobriquet “Notorious.” Everything about her seemed to live in happy contradiction. She followed her mother’s “dueling” advice: always to be a lady and to live a life of independence. She sparred almost daily with her more conservative “constitutionalist” colleague on the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia, yet considered him a […]
Francesca Zambello: Thoughts on opera in the time of Covid
On May 13th, Opera America launched its first annual conference online, marking the organization’s Fiftieth Anniversary. Over 1200 people had signed in when I checked the count of attendees, representing fellow artists and organizations the world over. Many, I’m sure, had been feeling scared or depressed, struggling through shutdowns, layoffs, and most especially questions regarding […]
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: 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 […]
Review: The Cunning Little Vixen, opera for children at Glimmerglass Festival
For parents pondering how they might introduce their children to opera and which might be most appropriate, look no further than The Cunning Little Vixen. This curious and fanciful little opera by the Czech Leos Janacek is based on an early twentieth-century series of newspaper cartoons filled with woodsy-critter characters then compiled into what we […]
Review: West Side Story at Glimmerglass Festival
With a big nod to the continued centennial celebration of “Lennie” (Leonard Bernstein) that this opening of Glimmerglass 2018 season represents, one cannot overestimate the importance of Jerome Robbins in mounting this production or indeed any West Side Story.  Even for the ambitious Glimmerglass Festival company, used to being thrown into the deep end in […]
Ring Cycle director Francesca Zambello has a gift for DC Theatre Scene donors
Opera director Francesca Zambello is as comfortable on the world’s largest stages as she is in a myriad of home kitchens around the world.
The Crucible at Glimmerglass Festival
In 1692, Tituba and a gaggle of Puritan girls frolicked by night in the woods outside Salem and allegedly conjured up the devil, an event that embroiled the witnesses and a whole township in a massive, tragic witch-hunt. By night, during this summer of 2016, surrounded by the woods of Cooperstown New York, there has […]
Sweeney Todd at Glimmerglass Festival
 Is it true, as Stephen Sondheim insists, that mostly audience expectations dictate whether a work is to be experienced as an opera or a musical? When pushed, however, he is equally adamant that his Sweeney Todd was squarely conceived as a musical. Well, Artistic Director of the Glimmerglass Festival, Francesca Zambello, and the entire ensemble […]
The Thieving Magpie at Glimmerglass Festival
 Well, this one’s for the birds! Full disclosure. I love a production that is steeped in fanciful storytelling. My background as a former teacher of theatre-movement makes me a sucker for anthropomorphic exploration in character building. And I swoon for the bel canto vocal sound, its clear bell-like tones and the agility of the voices […]