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Four Essential (and Local!) Summer Festivals
Summer opera in New York is very much like New Yorkers in the warmer months—an alternation between in town and out for the weekend. Fortunately, with even some of the most prestigious performances that...
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A Holy and Immediate 'Flute' from Peter Brook
In his groundbreaking 1968 work, The Empty Space, Peter Brook classifies theater into four camps: deadly, holy, rough and immediate. “Deadly” represents a form of theater weighted down by tradition,...
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What Difference Does a Cast Make?
A Magic Flute, the director Peter Brook's adaptation of Mozart's opera, now at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, removes the orchestra in favor of a piano as the sole...
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A Well-Executed 'Selma' at the Lincoln Center Festival
Those who have seen Lars von Trier’s bleak Dancer in the Dark know that an opera based on the 2000 cult film is not going to be a feel-good night of family fun.However, no amount of gut-wrenching,...
View ArticleOne-Person Shows: Star Vehicles but Compelling Drama?
There are at least 17 actors required to put on a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (and significantly more for Verdi’s opera, if you count the chorus). That is, unless you’re Alan Cumming and you’re...
View ArticleA Madman's Macbeth
There are more than 20 roles in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. But a recent new production of the play at the Lincoln Center Festival featured only a single performer speaking all the lines,...
View ArticleIn the Lincoln Center Festival's 'Orpheus,' the Theater Has Its Double
In ancient Greece, the concept of eidolon, or humans having a double, was a prominent one—and one often intertwined with the rites of death. Helen of Troy’s eidolon, in Homer’s hands, gives the...
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Audience to be Blindfolded for Lera Auerbach's Opera, The Blind
Operavores today probably think of themselves as radically apart from what is happening on stage. After all, the colossal fury, anguish, and depravity of such characters as Orpheus, Don Giovanni,...
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'Monkey: Journey to the West': Lavish, Lightweight Summer Fare at Lincoln...
If the month is July and the venue is Lincoln Center, shouldn't we be taking a break from the beach to contemplate the dark heart of the human psyche, guided by some furrow-browed Germanic theater...
View ArticleLincoln Center Festival Journeys to the West
A Chinese fable told in music and visual spectacle is one of the signature offerings of this year’s Lincoln Center Festival. Monkey: Journey to the West is a collaboration of director Chen Shi-Zeng and...
View ArticleHolocaust Opera The Passenger to Make Its NY Debut at Park Avenue Armory
Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s 1968 Holocaust opera The Passenger was suppressed by Soviet authorities during the composer’s lifetime but it has recently seen a spate of performances, including its American...
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Map: 15 New York-Area Summer Music Festivals for 2015
Summer means concerts in the hills, near beaches and in air-conditioned halls. Consult our guide to 15 of the summer's classical music festivals around the tri-state region – and share your own...
View ArticleWatch: Video of Lincoln Center's 'Paradise Interrupted'
From Verdi’s Nabucco to Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Delilah, operas have found inspiration in the Bible. A Chinese opera also inspired by the ancient parables, Paradise Interrupted, will have its New York...
View ArticleReview: 'Paradise Interrupted' Fuses Eastern Manners with Western Narrative
At traditional Chinese opera, you settle in for an extended duration, submit to being in the time zone of a distant dynasty and accept that something significant is happening when you can't grasp the...
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