Sharpenicity

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 S...

    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...

Charming and captivating sums up Constellation Theatre Company’s rendering of ABSOLUTELY! {perhaps} -Pirandello’s  parable about meddlesome characters trying to figure out what is the true story behind the mysterious new family in town. While Pirandello seems to play with the ideas of images and impressions for knowing the truth-- and makes short shrift of facts--he never discounts the reality of truth.  Ashley Ivey as Lamberto Laudisi guides the characters along, always reminding us of this  and the limits and fallacies in what we think we know.  There are of course three sides to every story.  The play presents  two opposite but connecting answers with Michael Glenn and Kimberly Schraf as the the pivotal characters Signor Ponza and his mother-in-law Signora Frola.  Can one be telling the truth? Can both be telling the truth?    Can both be lying? While there is much disagreement among the characters, this play, on wh...

The Love of the Nightingale is at Constellation Theatre  Overheard after the show: “Powerful” “So elegant.” “Violent beyond television but thought provoking.” These are not words to describe some modern day urban myth which might be debunked as an unbelievable scary story-- but it well sums up an ancient one that Sophocles first told of 2500 years ago. The snippets of his tale has been been adapted in many forms from Ovid in his magnificent opus Metamorphoses to the lastest theatrical treasure, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Love of the Nightingale .    Allison Stockman, Constellation Theatre Company’s founder and director, said she loved this play from the moment she read it.  Not only does it include all the exciting possibilities of theater (choreographied fight scenes, a retelling of Phaedra , a bawdy puppet show, wild Bacchanalian frenzy) but it goes to the meaning of theater and its  power of expression.    What is ...

                                     This  was my Moby Dick Moment! BACKGROUND: Washington National Opera premiered on the east coat the new American opera Moby Dick, February 22 to March 8.  Written by composer Jake Heggie and featuring an English-  language libretto by Gene Scheer based on Herman Melville’s 19th-century literary classic.    I have never read Moby Dick, so I was literally thrown into an ocean on this one:  Where to begin before I went to show? As an aside, most reviews tell you about what the reviewer  saw but first I want to show you what I saw and heard (something that is the miracle of the web that we can not do in print) so I am posting the selections the Kennedy Center put on line.  Watch and Listen WNO Commentary: Moby Dick 1 of 7: Introduction and Prelude: Before dawn, on the deck of the Pequod (audio onl...

La Vie en Rose , the In Series collaboration with The Washington Ballet Studio Company,  is not your usual song and dance show.  Evoking Parisian life through the musical palette of modern French cabaret chansons and belle epoque art-songs, the work is imaginative, emotional and energetic.   The singers walk and move among the ballet dancers.  While this is not unusual in itself, it is conceptually  different from musicals where singers and dancers share a stage but are clearly distinct.   In La Vie en Rose , one might say the singers and dancers move together to the same tune. They breathe together.  What one sees is how the body  of the dancer and the voice of the singer are expressing the meaning of the song simultaneously.    The coordination of two separate arts in this highly creative staging is not simply keeping to the same beat of the music.  What the singers and dancers share is their breaths in what mig...