When society seems bound together in a single shared experience, that is often the time when a work of art resurfaces, offering itself up as metaphor and speaking directly to the times. Duri…
On May 13th, Opera America launched its first annual conference online, marking the organization's Fiftieth Anniversary. Over 1200 people had signed in when I checked the count of attendees,…
Strange times have given us just that: time. Specifically, all of us have time inside to experience performances on our home screens. Individual artists and companies are scrambling to mater…
This first weekend in March brings together works from some extraordinary women working in exciting new directions today in the realm of 'opera and beyond.'Â In Series hosts a Women Compo…
It was inevitable. Don Giovanni would have to face the match of his life against the #MeToo movement. The problem is this production, not two years after the resplendent WNO production direc…
Opening night came on a Sunday afternoon for Samson and Delilah by Camille Saint-Saëns. It's an opera not seen in Washington for ages, and, headlined by the ravishing J'Nai Bridges, the e…
Opera Lafayette has taken on a prodigiously ambitious task in tackling the "reawakening" of Ludwig van Beethoven's single operatic masterpiece (Fidelio) by giving us the composer's earlier a…
I mostly love the works brought to DC by The Kennedy Center's World Stages. I love the sub-genre of one-person shows. I also take a serious interest and have been involved in working with th…
Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Nilo Cruz has come to Washington's GALA Hispanic Theatre to direct his most recent play, and has unleashed from his prodigiously creative mind something lik…
A stranger comes to town. He changes things up. He sheds a light on deep darkness. There are things the people don't want to see but can't look away. There is something of the shaman abo…
Carey Perloff's opening scene of the staged adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's shattering novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, moves with breathtaking beauty. Two women in one direction and a man i…
It was a rare pleasure to share the stage at the Smithsonian Institution's S. Dillon Ripley Center less than a week ago with colleagues who are also in the business of reviewing the performi…
For many of us in the audience of UrbanArias' new production, Glory Denied, the Vietnam War is not distant history. Like the characters in this opera by Tom Cipullo, we carry that war in…
2020 marks the 8th year of Washington National Opera's showcase of new compositional teams working in the most specialized art form of opera in a rollout of three twenty-minute operas. It's …
In 1981, the once enfant terrible of stage and screen, Peter Brook, then seasoned into arguably the most formidable theatre director in the world, took the opera world by storm with his radi…
Everyone has a special memory of their first musical. Mine was My Fair Lady. It had opened in London in 1958 on Drury Lane after taking Broadway by storm, and, as a young child living there,…
I Take Your hand in Mine is based on the intimate letters written between Anton Chekhov at the end of his life and his wife Olga Knipper. It has come to the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop in…
When singer/musician/educator John Langstaff launched a seasonal celebration of early music in Boston back in 1971, comprised of song and general merriment that would bring community togethe…
Make no mistake about it, I had this guy pegged in the first two minutes: a bumbling, bald-headed bungler trying to string together a show based on his own hoarding. Worse, an amateur! M…
Celebrating Opera Lafayette's twenty-fifth season, Ryan Brown has brought a rare and truly exquisite small gem of an opera to Washington audiences. To do so, Brown has left his more familiar…
How are we to recover from what divides us? How do we maintain hope in the face of catastrophe from climate crisis? Such questions are not new; in fact the clamor of them pounding for our at…
Synetic Theater opens its season with a remount of its 2013 hit The Tempest, complete with its stunning watery world creation, amphibian-like cast, pounding AMC decibel electronic score, and…
How do you like your Shakespeare? Intimate. Intelligent. Â Intrepid. And, I'd also add fully integrated through emotional truth and delivery of the musical richness of Shakespeare's langua…
Never underestimate the power of a classic to communicate across time, cultures, and language in new and urgent messaging. We have Producing Artistic Director Hugo Medrano, the longest servi…
Every age gets to reassess the value of a work of art relative to its present times, and not just aesthetically but politically. Never more so than today. Sometimes in our society's self-con…