Category Archives: Poetry

DYLAN IN RICHMOND

Bob Dylan’s concert in Richmond took place at the Richmond Coliseum, an edifice best described by the famous line, “What. A. Dump!” Nevertheless, the ageless Mavis Staples opened the three hour show with a feisty backup band as she reviewed some of her greatest hits and introduced a few of her new songs from her […]

November 12, 2017 – 3:42 pm | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Current Events, from Paul, History, Music, Poetry, The Gospel of the Kingdom, Theater, Theology | Comments Off on DYLAN IN RICHMOND

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

CST’s Love’s Labor’s Lost: A Charming Delight

Harold Bloom, Yale’s Sterling Professor of the Humanities, has a particular desire to see Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost: I have never seen a production of this extravagant comedy that could begin to perform to its vocal magnificence, but I always live in hope that some director of genius will yet deliver it to us. Marti […]

February 8, 2017 – 1:07 pm | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Current Events, from Paul, History, Men and Women, Poetry, Quotations, Theater | Comments Off on CST’s Love’s Labor’s Lost: A Charming Delight

Lyric Opera’s DON QUICHOTTE: A Hymn to a Holy Fool

A dying Jules Massenet wrote Don Quichotte knowing the woman he loved, soprano Lucy Arbell, would play the courtesan-lady Dulcinee after his death. Rather than create his own libretto from Cervantes’ mammoth novel, Massenet used Jacques Lorrain’s bastardized and abridged verse play, Le Chevalier de la longue figure, for his libretto. La Lorrain’s short play […]

December 8, 2016 – 10:12 am | By Paul Kuritz | Posted in Books, from Paul, History, Men and Women, Music, Opera, Poetry, Quotations, The Gospel of the Kingdom, Theater, Theology | Comments Off on Lyric Opera’s DON QUICHOTTE: A Hymn to a Holy Fool