Susan Hall
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Recent Articles:
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Film at Lincoln Center Presents Mexican Films Front Page
A Spectacle Every Day
By: - Jul 21st, 2024Film at Lincoln Center and the Locarno Film Festival present “Spectacle Every Day: Mexican Popular Cinema,” a retrospective of Mexican cinema from the 1940s through the 1960s, to be from July 26 through August 8. With new restorations of many works rarely screened or some never before seen theatrically in the United States, and standout performances from the biggest stars.
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Elevator Repair Service Creates a New Ulysses Front Page
Summerscape at Bard Presents Staged Novel
By: - Jul 15th, 2024Elevator Repair Service, an innovative theater producing group, presented a staged version of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the Luma Theater at the Fisher Center as part of Bard’s Summerscape 2024 whuich commissioned the work.
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Experiments in Opera at HERE Front Page
New York Gets Four Delicious Mini Operas
By: - Jul 05th, 2024The world premiere of “Five Ways to Die” took place at HERE in New York. If the subject is “death,” it must be an opera. Tosa jumps to her death from the walls of Castel Sant'Angelo. Aida and her lover die in an airless Egyptian tomb. La Traviata coughs herself to death in a Parisian garret. Defying death, all these women sing marvelously. We suspend disbelief, carried away by gorgeous tunes. Experiments in Opera, a successful and innovative company, takes a different approach.
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Ulysses Quartet in Greenwood Cemetery Front Page
Angel's Share Presents
By: - Jun 25th, 2024The Ulysses Quartet performed Beethoven’s final work, his string quartet in A minor, in the Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. The classical spirit of Leonard Bernstein, who is buried here atop Battle Hill, pervades the place. Programs are various and always tasteful. The setting enhances the experience
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La Jolla Playhouse Ballad of Johnny and June Front Page
Wonderful Cash Musical in San Diego
By: - Jun 17th, 2024The La Jolla Playhouse presents The Ballad of Johnny and June, a musical about the lives of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. Narrated by John Carter Cash, played by Von Hughes, the play begins with John trying to decide if he wants to get married. John Carter Cash was the only child of the union of Johnny and June. As John contemplates marriage, he tells the love story of his famous parents and their challenges with fame and addiction.
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Houston Symphony Performs Strauss' Salome Front Page
A Perfect Concert Evening
By: - Jun 13th, 2024The Houston Symphony presented Richard Strauss’ Salome. It was a perfect concert opera production. All the singers were not only off book, but costumed to perfection (or unveiled when that critical moment arrives).
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Dial M for Murder at the Alley Theatre Front Page
A Witty Thriller
By: - Jun 11th, 2024Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, in association with Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, is presenting Dial M for Murder as a warmup to their annual Summer Chills programming. Based on the original play by Frederick Knott that inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, the current version has been updated by Jeffrey Hatcher.
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An American Soldier Perelman Performing Arts Center Front Page
Huang Ruo and David Henry Wang Join Forces Again
By: - May 30th, 2024An American Soldier, an opera by Huang Ruo and David Henry Wang, has been developing for a decade. The 2024 version is co-commissioned by PAC NYC and Boston Lyric Opera. Audiences at the new Perelman Performing Arts Center in lower Manhattan, are the beneficiaries of deep thought and a moving musical response to a seemingly uncomplicated subject: the wish of a young man, born in the USA of Asian immigrants, to be considered ‘American.’
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Here There Are Blueberries at NY Theatre Workshop Front Page
Co-produced with Tectonic Theater Project
By: - May 29th, 2024Over and over again, in the Pulitzer-nominated play Here There are Blueberries, now playing at the New York Theatre Workshop in co-production with Tectonic Theater Project, we see photos of the commandants of the Auschwitz facility where the final solution was executed. They are comfortable, laughing together, being rewarded for work well done (gassing people) and in lounge chairs at a spa retreat on the property in Poland.
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Matthew Polenzani Sings at Park Avenue Armory Front Page
Ken Nodo Accompnies in intimate Officer's Room
By: - May 28th, 2024To hear great singers in the Officer's Room of the Park Avenue Armory is a special privilege. One of the largest rooms in the Armory, today it feels like a salon room in an elegant apartment. A lost world is very present for the audience up close and personal. The cherished tenor, Matthew Polenzani, a regular star at the Metropolitan Opera, gives us his special textures and dynamics.
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American Soldier Comes to PAC in New York Front Page
Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang Unite in Splendid Opera
By: - May 09th, 2024Huang Ruo’s opera, An American Soldier, opens May 12 at the new Perelman Performing Arts Center in lower Manhattan. This flexible theater is built for chamber opera, often the form new operas take.
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Miro Quartet Performs at The Crypt Front Page
Death of Classical Presents Home
By: - May 07th, 2024The Miro Quartet performed works centered around the theme of “Home” for the Death of Classical series in New York. In the crypt of a church in Harlem, reverberating in the acoustics of its stone arches, the Quartet sang. This program felt like a homecoming, immediate and warm.
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Madame Butterfly at Opera Philadelphia Front Page
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By: - May 01st, 2024Opera Philadelphia is bringing us Madame Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini with a twist one imagines the composer would have liked. The title role of Cio-Cio-San is a two-hander, performed both by soprano Karen Chia-Ling Ho and a puppet created by Hua Hua Zhang. In Anthony Minghella’s production, the puppet is Cio-Cio-San’s son. Now she is the exterior, public version of Butterfly, the one Lieutenant Pinkerton falls for and seduces and abandons. The director Ethan Heard and designer Yuki Izumihara came up with this notion.
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Anthony Roth Costanzo to Head Opera Philadelphia Front Page
Cutting Edge Company Makes the Best Choice
By: - Apr 25th, 2024The Opera Philadelphia Board of Directors has unanimously approved the appointment of Anthony Roth Costanzo as General Director and President effective June 1, 2024. A grammy-winning countertenor and creative producer who ”exists to transform opera” Costanzo will shape the future of a company known as “a hotbed of operatic innovation”, overseeing fundraising and business strategies, audience development, community initiatives, and artistic planning.
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Patriots by Peter Morgan on Broadway Front Page
Putin and the Oligarchs Explored
By: - Apr 24th, 2024Patriots is a compelling drama, written by Peter Morgan, who is not only a talented dramatist. He is a man who can grasp the politics of any situation he undertakes to put on stage. This production is a plain set (Miriam Buther) decorated by shifting lights (Jack Knowles) and composed sound (Adam Cork). You can’t take either mind or ears off it. Rupert Goold directs.
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Constellations by Nick Payne Front Page
Playing at the Chain Theatre in New York
By: - Apr 23rd, 2024Constellations by Nick Payne debuted on the West End in London and also on Broadway. Now it has a production at the Chain Theatre off-Broadway. An innovative new theatre group, The Company We Keep, is mounting the play. The engaging work exists in parallel universes and becomes, as the producers suggest, an immersive experience, suggesting the myriad ways in which each of our life experiences might expand.
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Tiergarten, a New York Carbaret Front Page
Carnegie Hall on the Lower East Side
By: - Apr 21st, 2024Tiergarten, a cabaret, opened for three nights in the Grand Hall of St Mary’s Church on the lower East Side of Manhattan. A participant in Carnegie Hall’s deep gaze at the music of the Weimar Republic, hot impresario Andrew Ousley gathered together a group of top-notch performers and a talented design crew to create an ageless event. When the doors close, a mad spirit is unleashed in Willkommen.
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Macbeth, an undoing, at Theatre for a New Audience Theatre
Zinnie Harris Reacts to Shakespeare
By: - Apr 12th, 2024Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) is producing Macbeth (an undoing) at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. The Royal Lyceum’s production of Macbeth (an undoing) at TFANA is a promising start to a reciprocal partnership, The Shakespeare Exchange, between Royal Lyceum and Theatre for a New Audience.
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General Manager of Met Opera Competes with Trump Front Page
Preivew of John Adams' El Nino at Works & Process
By: - Apr 04th, 2024John Adams’ masterpiece Oratorio, El Nino, is being given a full production at the Metropolitan Opera this spring. The work premiered at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in 2000. Kent Nagano conducted. Luxury casting included Dawn Upshaw, Lorrraine Hunt Lieberson and Willard White
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Dead Outlaw at the Minetta Lane Theatre Front Page
The Crew from Band's Visit Reunites
By: - Mar 29th, 2024Dead Outlaw is Audible’s latest production at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York. The band is central on stage from start to finish. We enter the world of a rocking hoe-down celebrating life after death.
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Doubt Revived by Roundabout Theatre Front Page
John Patrick Shanley's Timely Masterpiece
By: - Mar 22nd, 2024Doubt, John Patrick Shanley’s justly celebrated play, is running at the Roundabout Theatre in New York directed by Scott Ellis.
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Carnegie Hall Supports Young Musicians Front Page
Nezet-Seguin Conducts the National Youth Orchestra of the USA-Alumni
By: - Mar 18th, 2024The National Youth Orchestra-USA Alumni performed works by George Gershwin and Dmitri Shostakovich at Carnegie Hall. Yannick Nezet-Seguin conducted. Daniil Trifonov performed Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F with flair, flash and deep feeling.
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American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Front Page
Continuingto look at weimar and its Repercussions
By: - Mar 15th, 2024The American Composers Orchestra joined Carnegie Hall’s musical exploration of the Weimar Republic. Central to the evening’s presentation were two pieces: One, ‘Pirate Jenny’ from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. The other ‘Clans’ from Lowok Shoppola of the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma.
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Castalian Quartet at the 92nd Street Y Front Page
Sir Stephen Hough Pianist and Composer
By: - Mar 12th, 2024The brash and lively Castalian String Quartet and man-for-all-seasons Sir Stephen Hough performed at the Kaufmann Concert Hall at the 92nd Street Y in New York.
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La Jolla Playhouse Presents Redwood Front Page
Is Living in a Forest Canopy the Answer
By: - Mar 03rd, 2024Redwood, a musical drama conceived and written by Tina Landau and Idina Menzel, is currently playing at the La Jolla Playhouse. Composer Kate Diaz provides the expansive score with lyrics by Diaz and Landau. Redwood tells the story of Jesse (played by Idina Menzel), a hard-charging, no-holds-barred New Yorker who is struggling to find purpose in her life following the death of her young adult son.
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