Sharpenicity

CONSTELLATION THEATER COMPANY --THE FIRE AND THE RAIN Swami Vivakananda said it best. Abstract ancient practices must become living poetry in everyday life, that out of “hopelessly intricate myths must come concrete moral forms…”  so that even a child might grasp it! That is exactly what the Girish Karnad, India’s most celebrated contemporary award-winning playwright, screenwriter, film actor and director has done with his play The Fire and The Rain.  And that is what Constellation Theatre brings to the stage in a stellar production that everyone can grasp.   What seems at first a love store between Brahman youth Aravsu  (Dallas tolentino)  and tribal woman Nittilai (Lynette Rathnam) in the seventh year  of no rain, quickly spans over many places and times, interweaving many stories of complex relationships and emotions between friends, brothers, spouses, and parents.    Jealousy and power struggles, love and lust, sacrifice and vengeance are all familiar ingr

Don Giovanni lives! There is nothing even remotely retro about Mozart’s masterpiece Don Giovanni.  Neither the music nor the plot gets old in this Hit Parade top ten of operas currently performed.    So when the InSeries adopted a new setting, with the libertine noblemen re-incarnated as a 1920’s American religious revivalist,  the music and the story line were sure to work.  Other “collaborations” of composers and modern producers —despite centuries apart—have worked well in the past.    But more than that, the InSeries production underlines that the plot of this opera is still very much with us. Who to believe: the charismatic preacher who is a serial rapist: his diary of conquests is not unlike the files of the newspaper clippings of their victims or other trophies that police uncover that predators keep.  Or  Sister Elvira, a deserted woman:  Is she a mad stalker or a victim who no one will believe?   Then there is Sister Anna whose father has been killed by Don Giovann

    Dialogues of the Carmelites   The Washington National Opera:     Nuns like you have never seen before Conversation heard in the audience before the performance about Lady Gaga at the Academy  Awards singing songs from Sound of Music, including   the anthem song, Climb Every   Mountain, with its expression of human longing for spiritual direction of the Benedictine postulant Maria von Trapp.     There was surprise that Lady Gaga could sing so well. There would be no surprise that the opera singers in Dialogues of the Carmelites would sing  superbly.   That is a given especially when Francesco Zambello is the artistic director.     These nuns would not be climbing mountains to reach their spiritual goals.  They would be climbing the scaffold to the guillotine to fulfill their vow.   The production now, in an age where beheadings are video-ed across the world on the  internet, of an opera written 50 years ago, post World War II horrors of annihilat