The Glimmerglass Festival offers a unique opportunity to singers and audiences alike to be around living composers. The "live relationship" creates a work that breathes and where new discove…
Glimmerglass Festival has made a bold choice in re-mounting The Ghosts of Versailles, a complicated, multi-layered late 20th-century opera, as part of its 2019 season. Contemporary opera ten…
UrbanArias' Artistic Director Robert Wood continues to push the envelope of what makes for contemporary opera. In Elvis Costello, the famous Brit pop singer/song writer, he has found a compo…
The Band's Visit shows why it's a multiple Tony Award winner in its stop at The Kennedy Center. It's a musical that grabs your heart with the most unlikely thing in the world of showbiz: eco…
Rozina Kanchwala nails it: we in the U.S. live in a world of too many choices, where a girl can just ask Google to serve up a song instantly to match her mood. It's a time when everyone is s…
A "new" production of La traviata shared the buzz opening weekend at Glimmerglass Festival. Nonetheless, as a co-production with Washington National Opera (and a handful of other opera compa…
Glimmerglass Festival opened its 45th season with a sensational Show Boat. The musical, based on Edna Ferber's novel about a floating theater on the Mississippi, could have been delivered as…
Timothy Nelson has ended his first season as Artistic Director of In Series with a stunning and musically gorgeous production of The Tale of Serse. Like George Frideric Handel, the composer …
There are rare but important artistic experiences that serve as spiritual pilgrimages. This year, in a kind of riches of Grace, we have shared in two at Spoleto Festival. Compagnie Hervé Ko…
A sun-drenched morning greeted townsfolk and cultural tourists alike for the 43rd no-weather-spoiler day at this year's Spoleto Festival Opening. People gathered in the street outside City H…
While Spoleto Festival is perhaps best known for its cutting-edge premieres of opera, dance, and theater, it grants special dispensation periodically to productions by English language's fav…
How often we, in our silos, get stuck in our own work and schedules. Even more, artists miss opportunities to be fed and inspired by the interplay of other arts forms. If released, dancers s…
What makes someone a devoted opera fan? Is it the "gilterati?"Â If so, there was much in abundance Saturday night when the Washington National Opera hosted its Gala in the Opera House. Fr…
There's exceptional and important theater in Washington that too often gets overlooked. It doesn't come nicely packaged in season subscriptions or heralding stars from that other theater tow…
There's something wonderful when two paintings by different creators "hang" side by side and seemingly begin a conversation. It feels that something rich and more than serendipity has taken …
Never doubt the sheer power or the relevancy of a great work of opera. All you need for the first are extraordinary musicianship by a conductor, superb singers, and a stage director who can …
Brush up " your opera. There will be no better time to turn off, dial down, and otherwise forego small devices and experience the "think big" of live opera than in the 2019-2020 opera se…
How could one not run to a show that, in this day, puts together a story that purposes to go to the heart of a topic that raises both volatile antipathy and gut wrenching emotions of compass…
Only one week ago, Washington National Opera gave us a cool, minimalist modern take on a romantic opera (Eugene Onegin); this week the company took us back to an old world, even hedonistic a…
The wait of thirty years came to an end Saturday night when Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin returned to Washington in a spare yet stunningly beautiful production. The minimalist 'box' set …
British playwright Ella Hickson gets an American premiere of her sprawlingly ambitious and provocative play at Olney Theatre Center. Oil is a play written up as a "nexus of oil, economics, a…
Temperatures dropped sharply inside the Kennedy Center last night; they rose again exponentially. There were other, sometime violent, meteorological disturbances. In short, in the space of 8…
Billed as a workshop production to which the press was invited, Mosaic Theater Company's Shame 2.0 with Comments from the Populace opened Thursday night with all hands on deck in solidarity …
A lone figure stood in the spotlight at the start of what I've come to think of as Washington's most sparkling gala event. In the Opera House space which could have easily swallowed her up a…
Good news to opera lovers, opera is very much alive and growing in its John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (KC) home on the Potomac. While many big and small opera companies in Ne…