Front Page
-
Detroit Wineries
Not Just Cars from Motown
By: - Sep 29th, 2018Most folks have no idea of Detroit’s winemaking history. In 1702, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac wrote about the vineyards he planted along the Detroit River (some of the first in North America). Prior to Prohibition, Kownacki notes, several Michigan wineries existed. One of these became known as St. Julian Wine Company, which today produces more than 50 different kinds of wine.
-
Jay Jaroslav at Gloucester's Trident Gallery
Finding Art Through Covert Operations
By: - Sep 28th, 2018In 1978, at Boston's Atlantic Gallery, Jay Jaroslav displayed large, photo realist facsimiles of appropriated birth certificates. The certificates of infants roughly the artist's age had died within a week of birth. He used them to obtain social security, passports and driver's licenses to create 31 purloined identities. The current exhibition at Trident Gallery, his first solo in three decades, further explores documents and process as conceptual art.
-
JACK Quartet at the Catacombs
The Angel's Share Explores Modern Medieval
By: - Sep 28th, 2018We can count the ways the JACK delights in The Catacombs of the Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Depth, breath and height, as far as the strings can reach, up and down. The Catacombs, wrapped in a mysterious yellow light ebbing to darkness added to this moving presentation.
-
Miller Theater Premiers Missy Mazzoli
Proving Up Arrives in New York
By: - Sep 27th, 2018Aware that all art forms now compete with Netflix, composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek seek out stories for their musical theater that will attract audiences. Mazzoli, a masterful young composer, can go very dark in tales because her music, in its blocks of beauty no matter what the subject, is compelling and evocative.
-
A Classic Play by Ntozake Shange
African-American Shakespeare Company
By: - Sep 27th, 2018Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf is a work of great moment that gave black women a platform, in some ways a pedestal, from which to denounce their double indignity of racial and gender discrimination and announce their worth and beauty.
-
The Agitators at Gloucester Stage
Remarkable Friends Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony
By: - Sep 26th, 2018Beyond their names most folks don't know much about abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, and women's suffrage leader, Susan B. Anthony. The remarkable play, The Agitators, by Mat Smart, offers more than a history lesson at Gloucester Stage. It has been given a compact and powerful production sharply directed by Jacqui Parker.
-
Ne Quittez Pas at Opera Philadelphia
Patricia Racette Compels as Elle
By: - Sep 26th, 2018Ne Quittez Pas is writ large on a marquee in a hot neighborhood of Philadelphia. Hold on, it says. Don’t leave. Stay on the line. This is a phrase used repeatedly in the old French telephone service, a main character in the opera to unfold inside the club, Theater of the Living Arts, a disco/nightclub near the harbor.
-
Shaw's Arms and the Man
Chicago's City Lit Theater
By: - Sep 26th, 2018City Lit Theater’s new production of George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 play, Arms and the Man, takes full advantage of its broad humor. Perhaps Shaw’s most frothy script, director Brian Pastor directs it with panache, although he sometimes lets his cast drift into silliness.
-
Pirandello's Naked
Chicago's Trap Door Theatre,
By: - Sep 26th, 2018Pirandello is best known for his 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author, but he wrote a huge volume of novels and short stories, as well as 20 major plays. Trap Door’s production of Naked is engrossing and sometimes confusing, but Martinovich’s direction is smooth.
-
Bess Wohl’s Make Believe
World Premiere at Hartford Stage
By: - Sep 25th, 2018Make Believe has potential but it isn’t ready for prime time. When people start taking peeks at their watches during a 90 minute play, it’s a clear sign that something isn’t working.
-
Debra Jo Rupp Romps in The Cake
Geffen Playhouse Bakes Hilarous Comedy
By: - Sep 25th, 2018The Barrington Stage Company production of The Cake has gone West young man to LA's Geffen Playhouse. Now another coast shares the delicious comedy of Debra Jo Rupp. This is a run don't walk production.
-
Komische Oper, Berlin, Germany
Opening of the Season 2018/19
By: - Sep 25th, 2018Berlin's Komische Oper (Comic Opera) opened its 2018/19 season with some of the most successful productions of the previous season. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 'Zauberflöte' (Magic Flute) and Jerry Bock's 'Anatevka' which is better known as Fiddler On The Roof.
-
Glass/Handel at Opera Philadelphia
Barnes Museum Hosts Anthony Roth Costanzo
By: - Sep 25th, 2018Anthony Roth Costanzo has a manly strength and a feminine range, giving surreal power to the voice. Costanzo not only sports this range but is committed to bringing its beauty to an audience unfamiliar with the pleasures of classical music. His alliance with Opera Philadelphia and headline position at the second annual O 18 Festival in Philadelphia is represented in a program at the Barnes Museum.
-
Lucia di Lammermoor at Opera Philadelphia
Dark Yet Entrancing
By: - Sep 25th, 2018Rumors that Gaetano Donizetti was of Scotch origin swirled over the Italian countryside when his opera Lucia di Lammermoor was first produced. They were untrue. Now Laurent Pelly gives us a grim, grey countryside to match the mood of the opera's heroine. Brenda Rae triumphs in the role at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia.
-
Sky on Swings at Opera Philadelphia
World Premier of Lembit Beecher's opera
By: - Sep 24th, 2018Sky on Swings is a collaborative opera. The three principal artists, Lembit Beecher, Hannah Moscovitch and Joanna Settle have worked together for more than a year to bring a musical portrait of death-by-Alzheimer’s to the stage.
-
35MM: A Musical Exhibition
Unconventional Show in Boca Raton
By: - Sep 23rd, 2018Entertaining musical features electric dancing, singing and stunning visuals 35MM: A Musical Exhibition fuses photography and musical theater. Measure for Measure Theatre Company in South Florida, for the most part, scores a hit with their Ryan Scott Oliver/Matthew Murphy show
-
NAT by Verlon Brown at Theater for a New City
Directed by Rome Neal at Theater for a New City
By: - Sep 21st, 2018Remembering the Unforgettable Nat King Cole. New to the professional stage, Actor/Writer Verlon Brown brings the life of an extraordinary man to Theater for the New City, under the seasoned direction of Rome Neal.
-
Jaap van Zweden at the New York Philharmonic
A New Era Begins
By: - Sep 21st, 2018Opening night at the New York Philharmonic is a yearly tradition an occasion for fat cat donors to dine on the Promenade of Lincoln Center's David Geffen Hall, and for ordinary critics (like your humble scribe) to put on suits and hobnob with each other before the performance. This year's ceremonies, held Thursday night, were also notable as it marked the long-awaited official debut of Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra's new music director.
-
The Untranslatable Secrets of Nikki Corona
World Premiere at Geffen Playhouse
By: - Sep 19th, 2018Under the aegis of new artistic director Matt Shakman, The Geffen Playhouse in Westwood, premieres playwright Jose Rivera’s mystical new work “The Untranslatable Secrets of Nikki Corona,” directed by acclaimed, award-winning director Jo Bonney,
-
Joseph D. Ketner II (1955 - 2018)
Renowned Curator of Contemporary Art
By: - Sep 19th, 2018Joe Ketner had been the Lois and Henry Foster Chair in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice and Distinguished Curator-in-Residence at Emerson since 2008. In this dual role, he worked tirelessly both to give his students a sense of the social dynamism that art enables, as well as cement Emerson’s place as a source of that dynamism through its galleries and public art installations.
-
The Abduction from the Seraglio
Opera San Jose
By: - Sep 19th, 2018On opera’s dramatic measuring rod, any production of Abduction would fall on the comedic rather than the tragic end, but Opera San José pushes the comic meter to the point that opera detractors might even appreciate it as a stage comedy with music.
-
Space Odyssey 2001 at NY Philharmonic
Reprise of Classic
By: - Sep 18th, 2018Stanley Kubrick's seminal 1968 classic is now 50 years old, and remains as puzzling as ever. On Friday night, as part of this year's The Art of the Score festival, the New York Philharmonic performed the complete orchestral and choral music of 2001 as accompaniment to a large scale screening of the film at Lincoln Center.
-
Splendor In The Fresh Grass
Awards Day
By: - Sep 17th, 2018(At press time, I didn't have a list of winners that were announced at the Fresh Grass Festival's banjo and band awards) Nonetheless, the Fresh Grass Festival 2018 vesion has come to an end.
-
Crystal Bridges a Landmark Museum of American Art
Founded by Alice Walton in Bentonville Arkansas
By: - Sep 16th, 2018The largest work of art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is the museum itself, which serves as an anchor for the examination of architecture as art. The design of pods floating over a pond is the creation of Moshe Safdie.
-
More Fresh Grass Bluegrass Festival
Rhiannon Giddens Steals The Show
By: - Sep 16th, 2018Today is Sunday and the last day of the Fresh Grass Festival. With four stages, wonderful cuisine and an enthusiastic young crowd, why not drive to North Adams, Massachusetts and enjoy the nation's best museum themed bluegrass festival. Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder headline today at 5:50pm.
<< Previous Next >>