Category Archives: Acting

LYRIC OPERA’S CINDERELLA: A RED-BLOODED BEL CANTO VALENTINE

Gioachino Rossini (1792-18868) was but 24 years old when he wrote his world-famous opera The Barber of Seville. The following year he wrote Cinderella (Cenerentola), which was more popular than his Barber for many years. After composing forty operas, he retired at age 46, never to write another opera. The Cinderella (Cerenterola) (1817) by Rossini […]

THE MET’S CARMEN: BRILLIANT MUSICIANSHIP, BUT TEX-MEX IS NOT SPAIN.

“Bullfighting is the only art form that both represents something and is that thing at the same time: the matador’s elegant immobility in the face of the bull not only represents man’s defiance of death, it is a man defying death, and there are women who do it too.”[i] In Bizet’s classic opera Carmen, the metaphor of the life defying […]

PORCHLIGHT’S “ANYTHING GOES” IS A “DE-LOVELY” SURPRISE

When the musical comedy Anything Goes first played in Chicago in 1934 the nation and the city were caught in the country’s worst economic situation – The Great  Depression. The Great Depression was particularly severe in Chicago because of the city’s reliance on manufacturing, the hardest hit sector nationally. Only 50 percent of the Chicagoans […]

The Met’s NABUCCO: Verdi’s Beautiful Prayer for those in Exile

On February 23 of last year, Naomi Wolf,  author, feminist and former advisor to Bill Clinton and Al Gore published a remarkable essay, “Have the Ancient Gods returned?” In it she quotes Jonathan Cahn’s book The Return of The Gods[i]           “Having accurately traced the lineage of pagan worship and pagan forces, Cahn makes the […]

MET OPERA’S FLORENCIA EN EL AMAZONAS ENCHANTS WITH BEAUTY AND IMAGINATION

Composer Daniel Catan has been quoted as saying that he needed ” to write music that was seductive, glittering, and mesmerizing.” His opera Florencia en el Amazonas ia a welcome and enchanting addition to the world’s operatic contemporary repertoire, which has been dominated by nihilistic interpretations of classic operas. The libretto is by Marcela Fuentes-Berain, […]