Last night at The Met…

…C.C. caught the penultimate performance of Philip Glass’s pacificst epic “Satyagraha.” [Full review to come...]
Umm, so, aside from the gentleman two seats away from me who puked in the aisle right before the curtain for Act II went up, and the couple next to me who wouldn’t stop whispering through the quietest moments of the [...]

Strike A Pose

It’s going to be a dance day.

(Left: Ekaterine Kondaurova of The Kirov, photo by Andrea Mohin/NYT; Right: Teresa Reichlen of the NYCB, photo by Paul Kolnik/NYT)
I thought it would be fun to show these images side by side. On the left is Ekaterina Kondaurova performing “Rubies” from Balanchine’s “Jewels” with the Kirov Ballet, that has [...]

LAST WORD REVIEW: Candide @ New York City Opera

LAST WORD REVIEW: Candide @ New York City Opera
Sunday afternoon, The New York City Opera unofficially bid farewell to its landmark Harold Prince production of the invaluable Leonard Bernstein operetta, Candide. It took Mr. Prince’s production, begun at the Chelsea Theater in 1973 and later brought to the New York City Opera by Beverly Sills [...]

TO DO: CANDIDE

Ok, y’all. Now this is a rare occasion. I’m posting a “TO DO” for a major venue. But you must, I mean, MUST go see Candide at NYC Opera. It opens tonight and runs for about a week and a half.
Now, I haven’t seen this production, so, I can’t speak for that (it is, [...]

Ring Around The Family Circle

The Times is reporting that The Met has ended its unofficial policy of giving Ringtards (or Ringnuts or Ringheads or whatever you want to call the mass of fanatics who roam the world in search of the latest iteration of Wagner’s “Ring” cycle) priority access to future productions of the operatic tetralogy.
Needless to say, peeps [...]

A Collision Course With Tristan

Opera Review: “Tristan und Isolde” @ The Met
The Met’s latest mounting of Dieter Dorn’s 1999 production of “Tristan und Isolde,” Wagner’s insanely genius love-death opera retelling an ancient Celtic myth of star-crossed lovers via some of the most gorgeous—and I mean gorgeous—music ever written for the theater, has met an unusually gratuitous series of challenges [...]

THIS JUST HAPPENED

The road to erotic transcendence is a slippery slope.
C.C.’s reporting at 1:31AM because girl just got back from The Met’s rockin’-n-rollin’ production of “Tristan und Isolde”–which has already been beleaguered by a series of casting issues–and yet another stroke of bad luck befell the love-sick opera.
Just into the third act, what was meant to be [...]

Marketing Glass, and Gandhi

C.C. came across this poster this morning in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, just of Myrtle Avenue (aka, Murder Avenue). It’s an advertisement for The Met’s upcoming staging of Philip Glass’s opera “Satyagraha,” based on the early life of Gandhi (opens April 11).
This kind of confirms our theory that Peter Gelb has a large part of his [...]

More on Mortier

Tuesday night, General Manager-to-be of the New York City Opera, Gerard Mortier, gave a talk entitled “The Enchantment of The Opera” at the J. P. Morgan Library in Manhattan. The lecture was by no means an announcement of his first full season of opera programming, which will be in 2009-2010, and is said to include [...]

Return of PTD: More Gay. Less Glitter.

Review In Ellipsis: Paul Taylor Dance Company @ City Center
“Diggity”
Oooooooh. Dogs.