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: 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 Last American Hammer from UrbanArias
What an opening for an opera! After a low tremolo on the bass and some nice string section writing as violins, viola, and cello join in, suddenly on stage appears a bearded, para-military dude, as unlikely an operatic “hero” as one could imagine. You could picture him rolling into DC like thunder astride a thousand […]
Review: Why is Eartha Kitt Trying to Kill Me?: A Love Story
With Why is Eartha Kitt Trying to Kill Me?, UrbanArias has given us an operatic gem, and the talents assembled for the production have encased this most entertaining work in pure gold.
Review: New opera Florida from UrbanArias
With Florida, the world premiere of an opera by composer Randall Eng and librettist Donna Di Novelli, Urban Arias just got bigger. It’s not just that the piece of ninety-five minutes didn’t feel like the company’s proverbial “quickie.” The robust seventeen-person orchestra included a gorgeously featured brass section and contained some serious licks on drums […]
New opera: Shining Brow, Frank Lloyd Wright in love (review)
One doesn’t go to Urban Arias expecting masterpieces. The whole adventure is about sharing in Founder and Artistic Director Robert Wood’s risk-taking in mounting new or almost new operatic works. The shows selected are always smart and (blessedly) short. The production values are always good, as they are here in Shining Brow. There are high-caliber […]
New chamber opera Independence Eve from UrbanArias (review)
UrbanArias pulls off a seemingly impossible task with Independence Eve by Sidney Marquez Boquiren and Daniel Neer, a chamber opera of three scenes with two singers, which deals with race relations in the US from the recent past to the near future all within 70 minutes.
Lucy, the latest short opera from UrbanArias (review)
UrbanArias has gone wild! The company that pushes boundaries, reconceiving opera that is short, smart and fast, has given us an opera about a chimpanzee. Luckily, the chimpanzee, which we learn could perform just about everything else (and she does smile and laugh,) does not sing.
Opera in Washington – The 2016-2017 Season
– Notes from the talk delivered by Susan Galbraith at The Smithsonian on August 16th – On a good day in the Greater Washington area there are more than 15 opera companies of various ilks and sizes. Not all present regular programming. Some, like Lorin Maazel’s Castleton (still in hiatus after the maestro’s death), or Wolf […]
After Life and Josephine from UrbanArias (review)
After Life and Josephine are two short operatic works featuring original music by Tom Cipullo. The first presents Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso in a heated discourse about life decisions and regrets while the world premiere second act features Josephine Baker in a conversation with us …in her dressing room. Be still my heart, what’s […]
As One, transgender opera from UrbanArias (review)
Pulsing music from a string quartet becomes a cinematic soundtrack to footage of green water swiftly flowing. The images change to handlebars while on stage a seated man pedals the air, the baritone singing ecstatically “Like every other boy, I have a paper route!”
From creation of transgender opera, As One, to UrbanArias’ quick embrace
“This project has changed me completely,” Laura Kaminsky told me, “as an artist and as a composer. It’s been an amazing experience so far. For months, I was taking Hannah’s spirit everywhere with me. She was haunting our household.”
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