Category Archives: Current Events

HOW THE HELL DID I GET HERE? Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Lesley Nicol AKA Mrs. Patmore

One person plays usually mean an actor portraying a famous person on stage. The most famous one person plays are probably Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain and Julie Harris as Emily Dickinson. Through the work of various  artists, solo performances developed as living artists played themselves on stage. The psychologically intense confessional comedies by Spaulding […]

April 3, 2022 – 3:44 pm | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Acting, Current Events, from Paul, History, Men and Women, Movies, Music, Quotations, Theater | Comments Off on HOW THE HELL DID I GET HERE? Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Lesley Nicol AKA Mrs. Patmore

THE METROPOLITAN OPERA’S RIGOLETTO: MISDIRECTED BEAUTY

Two years after the 1851 premiere of Rigoletto at La Fenice in Venice, Verdi summarized his opera in words which seem to pertain to almost every production of the opera: As far as dramatic effectiveness is concerned, it seems to me that the best material I have yet put to music (I’m not speaking of […]

January 31, 2022 – 12:48 pm | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Acting, Books, Current Events, Dance, from Paul, History, Men and Women, Music, Opera, Quotations, Theater | Comments Off on THE METROPOLITAN OPERA’S RIGOLETTO: MISDIRECTED BEAUTY

BOB DYLAN CONCERT: A “GHOSTLY APPEARANCE”

Since  it opened its doors in 1889 Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre has heard the world’s  great voices, in words, in music, and in both. On Wednesday, the eighty year old  Nobel Prize-winning Bob Dylan offered an inspired  concert which placed him in that pantheon of voices. Dylan opened the concert with 1971’s “Watching the River Flow”, […]

November 5, 2021 – 7:19 am | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Art, Current Events, from Paul, Music, Poetry, Quotations, Theater, Theology | Comments Off on BOB DYLAN CONCERT: A “GHOSTLY APPEARANCE”

CHICAGO SHAKESPEARE’S AS YOU LIKE IT: NON-STOP JOY

In the early 1970s countless undergraduate and graduate stage directing students had the “happy idea” of setting Shakespeare’s As You Like It in a then new and en vogue  Back-to-Nature commune,  populated mostly by trust fund baby revolutionaries fleeing Richard Nixon’s America. Arden was a Vermont ashram, the center of the American counterculture, home to […]

October 31, 2021 – 6:47 pm | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Acting, Current Events, from Paul, History, Men and Women, Music, Quotations, The Gospel of the Kingdom, Theater, Theology | Comments Off on CHICAGO SHAKESPEARE’S AS YOU LIKE IT: NON-STOP JOY

MODEST MUSSORGSKY HAS HIS DAY: BORIS GODUNOV DONE HIS WAY

Exactly one hundred and fifty years since Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov was rejected for performance by Russia’s Mariinsky Theatre his version of his opera is staged and transmitted live to hundreds of thousands of spectators around the world. Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881) came from a more or less peasant family in Russia. That fact, plus his […]

October 10, 2021 – 3:39 pm | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Acting, Current Events, from Paul, History, Music, Opera, Poetry, Quotations, Theater | Comments Off on MODEST MUSSORGSKY HAS HIS DAY: BORIS GODUNOV DONE HIS WAY