Sharpenicity

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA     AT THE FOLGER THEATRE Antony and Cleopatra is a study in contrasts. It will go from this—  To this.... in two hours in front of our eyes. For starters, their relationship has been explored and e xploited in every form.   As one of Cleopatra’s modern biographers,   Stacy Schiff has observed —she has had the busiest of afterlives with incarnations as “an asteroid, a video game, a cliché, a cigarette, a slot machine, a strip club, a synonym for Elizabeth Taylor.”   Antony on the other has been documented in detail in Roman history.   Together the two some have been featured in   plays and movies (including one horror film) and opera.   The   Folger   production uses for the   stage   a triangular platform in the center of the theater, very simple but  an  effective way to remove all distraction from the core of the story and bring the audience into the circl...

Die Zauberflöte The Met: Live in HD While the flute is probably the oldest of musical instruments (at least according to archeological finds that places at 40-60,000 years ago),  on  the top ten most popular operas performed today (according to Operabase) there is the forever young Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute . This fairy tale opera seen Live in HD has everything going for it:  Mozart’s music,  the fantasy of Julie Taymor’s production, and the cast  with Golda Schultz as Pamina to Charles Castronovo’s Tamino,  Rene Pape as Sarastro to Kathryn Lewek as Queen of the Night and Markus Werba as Papageno.   But there is more!  One of the joys of seeing this in  Live in HD was Conductor James Levine’s smiles of joy  as he directed!   Another was  watching interviews by hostess Nadine Sierra as she talked to not only the singers but the puppeteers  (one of the bears did a tap dance  for movie viewer...

NORMA   An opera to make hearts swoon The Met: Live in HD When Norma, that Druid priestess chooses to walk into her death by fire for her sins, she stepped into opera immortality, only to be resurrected every decade when a cast of singers converge who can give divine deliverance of Bellini’s blessed opera.  That day is now — with the Met’s production of Norma , with Sondra Radvanovsky in the lead role.  Her protege priestess-in-training  and rival in love is Joyce DiDonato in her first undertaking of the role of Adalgisa.   The pairing of the two for the beloved soprano duets, is wrought with the conflicting emotions of two very good women entangled in relationships with one forbidden lover.  (Tenor Joseph Calleja is the Roman proconsul, Pollione)   And if it seems too unbelievable that these good women are so enthralled with the deity while fighting over a man,  their singing together has been proclaimed divine...

TOMAS SARACENO  ENTANGLED ORBITS     BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART Clouds, bubbles, and spider webs What can they have in common?   Each is a model from nature, a masterpiece of architectural design, in which to view not only beauty but adaptability and integrity in natural formations.  Tomas Saraceno is an Argentinian-born, Berlin-based artist and architect inspired by these structures.      His exhibit Entangled Orbits at the Baltimore Museum of Art until June 2018, will undoubtedly inspire others. Saraceno’s works are diverse with a underlying quality of engaging the mind and the spirit simultaneously.  Each of the four major works are in their own space, offering both contrasts in styles and continuity of themes of the artist’s work. Entangled Orbits captures the light and sky of the outdoors blending with the floors and the walls the East Lobby to direct  one’s vision upwards   for a...

WIDOWERS' HOUSES By George Bernard Shaw  Class and cash clash in GBS play first staged in 1892. On a continental holiday, the idealistic Dr. Harry Trench played most nobly by Scott Harrison, along with his friend  William deBurgh Cokane played obsessively mannerly by Michael Glenn,  meet  Mr Sartorius, a self-made businessman, played quite properly by Lawrence Redmond along with his daughter Blanche, acted by the lovely Madeline Farrington.  Paige O’Malley gets to play two roles—in Act I, that of the feisty waitress to serve tea to the cast in a garden restaurant of a hotel at Remagen on the Rhine.  In Act II, at the Sartorius home in Surbiton, she is the maid, who cries at the threat  of being fired, enduring a choking from Blanche, and moving  quite cheery along.   She serves both the other characters  and to remind us there is another class of people to those  we see in the play. Harry and Blanche fall in love...

The Wild Party  the stars shine at Constellation Theatre Side Note—this week the Supreme Court  will hear a case (referred to as “Peaches”) —A  DC house party in the free-for-all culture that went wrong…arrests for “disorderly conduct”  …government sued for millions of dollars —Attorneys Generals from 26 states contend the D.C. Circuit ruling will have “vast consequences”  etc. This is not that party but one back in the Roaring Twenties in NYC.   You be the judge. Dazzling from the get-go, The Wild Party is a visceral and immersive experience.   Sensual to the max yet a strong moralistic fable.   This is the story of two vaudeville performers —Queenie and Burrs—in a tangled relationship of sexual attraction and domestic abuse who give a party in which booze, drugs and sexual excess end in several tragedies. Before the show even starts, one can admire the space  designed by Scenic Designer Tony Cisek, which ...