Front Page

The Angel's Share at Green-Wood cemetery concluded is season with a double bill of horror operas. In Tell-Tale Heart, Jennifer Johnson Cano charted her devolution into violence and self-incrimination with gusto, her final outcry answered only by that thumping two-note figure from Gregg Kallor's keyboard. Was she mad? Had she committed murder? Was there ever an old man to be killed in the first place? All these questions swirled and squirmed in one's mind, and the only answer follows.

Place by Ted Hearne has its world premier as part of BAM’s New Wave Festival. Like Giuseppe Verdi whose music became the anthem of Italian unification, Hearne is a voice for the big issues before our country. His new oratorio addresses ‘gentrification.’ It is deeply personal and deeply moving.

The Eclipse Annual Exhibition features work by residents of the North Adams, studio/loft residence complex. The reception from 6 to 8 PM, Friday, October 12 launches the annual Open Studios that weekend. The popular event provides the opportunity to interact with artists in the setting where their work is created. In addition to studios work by resident artists is displayed in corridors of the four floor complex that houses 40 units.

With 154 Years of Serendipity the artists Roger Kizik and Clara Wainwright celebrate their creaitive friendship with an exhibition at Kayafas Gallery in Boston's SOWA district. John Walsh, Director Emeritus of the J. Paul Getty writes about the pairing of Wainwright & Kizik.

The Girl of the Golden West returned to the Met this month with a good cast. On Monday night, a performance featuring tenor Yusif Eyvazov and soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek provided a much needed shot of red blood to an anemic fall season.

Wilde’s highly-charged, sexual novella, and the Hollywood production code-driven 1945 movie, intrigued A Noise Within theatre director Michael Michetti, into tackling a stage adaptation in 2006 at Pasadena’s Boston Court Theatre. Mr. Michetti’s 2018 production now on stage at the A Noise Within Theatre, in East Pasadena, closely adheres to Wilde’s original story and most of his dialogue.

Final Follies, an evening of one act plays by A.J.Gurney is playing at The Cherry Lane Theater home of Primary Stages, Gurney's primary producers over the past decade. The first play, titled Final Follies was delivered to Gurney's agent a week before he died last year. It is a juicy send off for a haute Wasp author, who sees acting in porn movies as a job solution for waning WASPs looking for a way to earn a living.

My Parsifal Conductor, Allan Leicht's hilarious and touching comedy on the late domestic life of Richard Wagner, which extends into immortality, is playing at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater through November 3. At the center of the curtainless stage is a big double bed over which a heavenly canopy hangs. We are somewhere between heaven and earth where Cosima Liszt Bulow Wagner is taking her last gasps. She is ninety and married Richard Wagner 60 years ago, after the birth of their three children, Isolde, Eva and Siegfried. Wagner died after 13 years of marriage.

One month after the close of its 86th season, Jacob’s Pillow announces record-breaking ticket sales for its acclaimed summer dance festival. The organization reports over $2.5 million in ticket sales, an increase of 13% when compared with 2017; over 40,000 tickets were sold, an increase of 5%, when compared with last year. The season boasts 10,000 unique ticket buyers, an increase of 8% and the largest number since the organization began tracking this particular indicator in 2005.

One would argue that in opera singers of a vanished age, it was the voice and only the voice that mattered. These words would be fitting as a eulogy for Montserrat Caballé. The soprano, who passed away at the age of 85, possessed one of the largest and most flexible instruments of her age, succeeding in everything from Rossini to dramatic operas by Puccini and Strauss.

The final fall production of Barrington Stage Company for a number of years had been coordinated with the reginal school curriculum. It has been the norm to explore an agenda with social justice theatre. This time, however, Barrington has opted to focus on ars gratia artis. Teachers as their lesson plan will discuss a harrowing masterpiece of American theatre, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.

Kathy Scambiatterra directs this complex political/musical story, based on the Czech music fans and political dissidents in the years between the Prague Spring in 1968 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989.

Audiences will eat up South Florida fun and funny production of Little Shop of Horrors. Over-the-top humor, mixed with some subtlety, add up to a biting Lightning Bolt Productions' mounting. The director serves double duty as the nerdy Seymour.

A successful production requires an excellent Cervantes/Don Quixote and Phillip Hernandez meets the challenge. His voice is expressive and powerful, he bring a sense of age to the part, and his acting totally encompasses the character.

While he may be best known for directing award-winning films like “Apocalypse Now” and the “Godfather” series, Francis Ford Coppola (www.FrancisCoppolaWinery.com) was a winemaker before he was a filmmaker.

Paul Muldoon, a 67 year old New Yorker, originally from Northern Ireland, recited his poetry while the band, Rogue Olifant, played accompanying music. The evening at Hancock Shaker Village emulated a 1960s scene from my past.

Puglia is referred to as the 'boot or heel' of Italy. It is located easternmost on the bottom of Italy and has 325 miles of coastline, whch helps enhance the grapes from the province. The wines are interesting and kin to American Zinfandel, a varietal dominant in the northwest.

The High Line is a big idea writ large, just like operas. It forms a perfect set for Mile Long Opera. Elizabeth Diller gets a director’s credit for an opera written specially for this location by David Lang. Anne Carson is librettist and Claudia Rankine, essayist. Mile Long Opera is subtitled, a biography of 7 pm, a time of transition from work to home.

Zürich is played by 10 actors—two each in five scenes—set in a luxury hotel room or rooms in that Swiss banking city. The play begins in a seemingly lighthearted way, with a man and a woman who have spent the night together in a room on the 40th floor of a Zürich hotel.

Now at mid career, with 20 Grammy Awards, Pat Metheny launched a tour at the Cabot Theatre in Beverly, Massachusetts. While performing material from those now classic albums he did so with emerging musicians. He derived fresh energy and inspiration from Gwilym Simcock on piano/keyboards, Linda Oh on bass, and Antonio Sanchez on drums. Yet again his guitar virtuosity sparked a phenomenal performance.

A star attraction on the European circuit, Italian Carmen Giannattasio makes her San Francisco Opera debut and role debut as the title character. The soprano was offered the part earlier in her career, but she declined.

This is a group of detestable, rotten apples, but each of these men is also, in his own way, disarming and hilarious, with quirks and charms that make us forget why they are in this make-shift homestead wearing ankle bracelets; until we’re reminded, and once again infuriated by the hypocrisy. This is a world premiere by Bruce Norris.

Mendoza, a thrillingly raw and earthy adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, is being presented this week at Goodman Theatre in collaboration with the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance.

One complaint about Oslo that may be heard is that we already know its outcome. Twenty-five years beyond, notable progress has been made, but the condition between Israelis and Palestinians remains sad and unresolved.

Bill Irwin, with his mastery of the physical, clownish gesture and the musical lines of language presents a moving portrait of selections from Samuel Beckett’s work at the Irish Repertory Theater through November 4. Interspersing his own commentary with performance, we are taken in and out of the playwright’s work, as Irwin explains clowning and physical theater, an important part of Beckett, and also productions past in which he has enjoyed the company of Steve Martin and the late Robin Williams whose body sailed into a Godot scene. In Beckett you laugh through pain.