Category Archives: Books

TIDEWATER STAGE’S THE 39 STEPS: A HILARIOUS HOMAGE

“Spoof’ was originally a late 19th century drinking game involving coins. By the late 1950s the term began to be used to describe a skit or “send-up” of a popular literary or cultural genre. By the late 1970s “spoof” had engendered a theatrical movement known as the “Theatre of the Ridiculous”, itself a send up […]

June 18, 2017 – 8:29 am | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Books, Current Events, from Paul, History, Movies, Music, Theater | Comments Off on TIDEWATER STAGE’S THE 39 STEPS: A HILARIOUS HOMAGE

EUGENE ONEGIN at the Met: Netrebko Redefines Tatiana

Some fans of Alexander Pushkin’s great and iconic verse novel Eugene Onegin can’t stomach Pytor Illyich Tchaikovsky’s operatic version. Too much of the master Russian author’s brilliance is lost, they say, in the opera’s simplified libretto, written in only nine days. Pushkin’s 1833 novel is a text that “divides Russian literature into a ‘before’ and […]

April 23, 2017 – 3:06 pm | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Books, Current Events, from Paul, History, Men and Women, Music, Opera, Poetry, Theater | Comments Off on EUGENE ONEGIN at the Met: Netrebko Redefines Tatiana

Lyric Opera’s Eugene Onegin: Tatiana’s Triumph

Like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Pytor Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is not eponymous. The play is named, not, as Dostoyevsky famously argued, for the play’s main character, but rather for the character who sets the main character in action. The main character in Tchaikovsky’s opera is, instead, the country girl, Tatiana Larina. And Tatiana might owe her […]

March 5, 2017 – 12:26 pm | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Books, History, Men and Women, Music, Opera, Poetry, Theater | Comments Off on Lyric Opera’s Eugene Onegin: Tatiana’s Triumph

Lyric Opera’s CARMEN: Ashford and Calleja Make History

“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 Rob Ashcroft’s magnificent new telling of Bizet’s Carmen, the […]

February 20, 2017 – 9:09 am | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Art, Books, Current Events, Dance, from Paul, History, Men and Women, Music, Opera, Quotations, Theater, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Lyric Opera’s CARMEN: Ashford and Calleja Make History

The Irish Theatre of Chicago’s THE WEIR: “A strange [but wonderful] little evening”

When I lived on a five-acre farm in Maine, I found myself strangely fascinated with the behavior of male birds. It seemed that whenever a female swallow appeared the male swallows engaged in all sorts of madcap aerial displays, loop-d-loops, dives, deal falls, etc. On the other hand, when a female cowbird appeared, the male […]

January 9, 2017 – 11:30 am | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Books, Current Events, from Paul, History, Maine, Men and Women, Quotations, The Gospel of the Kingdom, Theater, Uncategorized | Comments Off on The Irish Theatre of Chicago’s THE WEIR: “A strange [but wonderful] little evening”