394 stories by "Susan Galbraith"
You might think with a name like The Apocalypse of Darkness you'd be served up a screamingly funny horror flick send up, but creator/director Emanuel Wazar is deadly serious. Apocalypse i…
If Robert Louis Stephenson's Storybook world were cooked up together with a fairy tale opera like Cinderella and spiced with the comedic talents of Carol Burnett in Once Upon a Mattress, …
 As the story goes, when composer Andrew Lloyd Webber first sent his original recording of the Evita songs to Hal Prince to get the producer involved, Prince responded, "Any musical that …
Shakespeare is an adventure with the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company and especially when staged as a moveable feast in the Patapsco Female Institute Historic Park. Using the ruins of a once t…
Sometimes the best of the "best in art" sneaks up on you. So it was with Spoleto Festival USA's 2016 season. Maybe this year it had to do with the fanfare around the Festival's "made-for…
Soprano Alyson Cambridge, who began her career here in Washington, DC and has gone on to perform on some of the major opera stages of the world including Washington National Opera. She…
Alarm Will Sound presented a concert version of the opera The Hunger by Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy at the Kennedy Center Wednesday night. It is a most curious mash of video interview…
This year's big fortieth anniversary event at Spoleto Festival USA was the long-anticipated new production of George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess, as a celebration of the city that gave b…
Last time I was here in 2013 I was swept into the flurry of opening celebrations, including the noontime grandstand with mayoral speeches and brass band and the late night garden party for s…
Have you ever sat beside a lake at night and listened to the sounds? Or stood on an urban street corner in inky blackness or more exactly in a snowstorm where the world becomes unfamiliar in…
Louis Lovett is a teller of stories. From Ireland he is and he is simply grand. I have it on good authority from two smallish people and one not so smallish I met at the Kennedy Center last …
Henrik Ibsen shocked the world with the psychological portrait of a female "monster of unsexed depravity" in his Hedda Gabler and cemented his reputations as the father of modern drama, in p…
Friday morning, images across TV screens and in The Washington Post flashed pictures of wildfires burning in the oil fields of Alberta, Canada. For those of us this past week who have lived …
Projections follow music and carry us from clouds to forest canopy. But how quickly the woods change to a panorama of deforestation. Magnificent trunks become denuded logs and are carried by…
"Nun zäume dein Ross, reisige Maid!" ("Mount your horses, cavalry maiden!") We're in for a ride! Zambello's big pre-show announcement on opening night of The Valkyrie was that Christine Goe…
In the darkened Kennedy Center Opera House, the music begins so quietly one thinks maybe it is only imagined. But that E-flat major triad rolls on and grows. On an enormous screen, from a mu…
Renée Fleming walks on stage and shares confidentially that when she isn't jetting to the glamorous capitals of the opera world or singing the great soprano roles on stage, she is making tr…
April turns out to be an "epic" month in the city. This week Washington National Opera opens its much-anticipated full "Ring Cycle" by Richard Wagner, and Constellation Theatre, the c…
Francesca Zambello is directing Wagner's Ring Cycle that opens April 30th at The Kennedy Center and brings to Washington National Opera for the first time the whole four-part epic oper…
Kennedy Center's World Stages is what I might call a rolling festival of international works that defy easy categorizing of genres, and no show more so than The Odyssey: from Vietnam …
Many people taking their seats for the first time at WNO's Lost in the Stars may wonder at the production's stark and formidable stockade, lit but darkly. The leader of the Chorus enters and…
Following the plinkety-plinks of a somewhat less-than-shimmering overture " after all, it is a "junk yard" gamelan " delicately carved puppets transport us through their shadow play. Â All…
Washington National Opera’s Better Gods brings a mostly unknown chapter in Hawaiian history onto the stage at the Kennedy Center, telling the story of Queen Lili'uokalani, the is…
I continue to celebrate the voices and the productions that were heard in Washington this Fall as part of the Women’s Voices Theater Festival. Frankly, I'm also still mulling over the …
There's much to learn watching a production being remounted by essentially the same team. The riches and new challenges proved fascinating in the rarity of Vivaldi's Catone in Utica that pla…
