Opera Theater Reviews: Best Shows & Critic Recommendations Page 12

BWW Review: THE PEARL FISHERS Proves to Be a Real Catch at The Dallas Opera
by Zac Thriffiley - April 06, 2022

The Dallas Opera's production of Bizet's THE PEARL FISHERS acts as a satisfying palate cleanser, providing the talent audiences have come to expect from the company as well as a dream of a show....

BWW Review: UCO Opera's THE CONSUL Is a Haunting Tale of Caution
by Adrienne Proctor - April 05, 2022

UCO's opera department offers a cautionary tale. The Consul tells the story of one family trying to escape a country they can no longer call home. Though it ran on Broadway in 1950, it brings to mind current images that are seen on the news every night. Parallels to refugees and the bureaucratic sys...

BWW Review: Stemme and Davidsen Do a Fine Sister Act in ELEKTRA by Strauss at the Met
by Richard Sasanow - April 03, 2022

Richard Strauss’s ELEKTRA is simply overwhelming--particularly when you have Nina Stemme and, especially, Lise Davidsen, as the title character and her sister Chrysothemis, ably abetted by Greer Grimsley as their brother, Orest, and an incredible supporting cast top to bottom....

BWW Review: San Diego Opera's Creative and Effective ROMEO AND JULIET
by Ron Bierman - April 02, 2022

Gounod’s overture introduces ROMEO AND JULIET with a prophetic mix of lyrical romance and tragedy. Yves Abel, the Principal Conductor of the San Diego Opera, is an expert in French opera and made sure that resonant brass and lush strings produced the mood a Parisian composer of the time would have f...

BWW Review: EUGENE ONEGIN at the Metropolitan Opera
by George Weinhouse - March 29, 2022

The 2013 production of Tchaikovsky's Pushkin-inspired opera EUGENE ONEGIN has triumphantly returned to the Met. I attended the final dress rehearsal and can attest to the fact that the story of Tatyana's infatuation with, and later rejection of, the eponymous 'hero' is vocally in superb hands. Both ...

BWW Review: Technology Is in Control as We UPLOAD the Future at the Park Avenue Armory
by Richard Sasanow - March 24, 2022

I couldn’t help thinking of a new science fiction-comedy series on Amazon during the local premiere of UPLOAD, the opera by Michel van der Aa at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday. Both had the same name. Both explore a near future where technology controls everything, including the afterlife, as a p...

BWW Review: Timeless Myths from MOUNTAINS & SEAS Mesmerize St. Ann's Audience
by Richard Sasanow - March 17, 2022

Another work salvaged from this year’s Covid-aborted Prototype Festival has shown up in New York--at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse, this time--and it couldn’t have been further away from the last I experienced, Taylor Mac’s THE HANG, if it tried. BOOK OF MOUNTAINS & SEAS is the work of composer/lib...

BWW Review: Dazzling RODELINDA Proves the Met's Not Too Big To Handle Handel
by Richard Sasanow - March 14, 2022

If Friday night’s performance of Handel’s RODELINDA sometimes seemed like it was never going to end--it was quickly approaching the witching hour by the time the curtain calls were over, having started at 7:30--it certainly wasn’t the fault of the cast but Handel himself and librettist Nicola Haym. ...

BWW Review: You Know How to WHISTLE – Put Sondheim's Score in the Right Hands, As MasterVoices Concert at Carnegie Hall Showed
by Richard Sasanow - March 13, 2022

The original title of the Sondheim-Laurents ANYONE CAN WHISTLE was THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS, though the crowd at Carnegie Hall on Thursday for the MasterVoices concert performance of the trouble musical were hardly fidgety. They were willing and able to sit through the cockamamie book and story Arth...

BWW Review: THE MAGIC FLUTE at Des Moines Metro Opera
by DC Felton - March 10, 2022

I love seeing in the arts when a company takes a classic work and reimagines it for a modern audience. This often allows for more imaginative and innovative production that brings a brand new audience to your company. As they begin their 50th Season, Des Moines Metro Opera brings Wolfgang Amadeus Mo...

BWW Review: DON JUAN at Wroclaw Opera
by Natalia Jarczynska - March 09, 2022

A romantic burlesque turns out to be an abstract path to nothingness through perverse vanity. Must see....

BWW Review: WRITTEN IN STONE at Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater
by Mary Lincer - March 07, 2022

The Washington National Opera has gathered a company of first rate singers for a portmanteau of four, one-act operas called Written in Stone. Unfortunately, their fine skills and exceptional voices cannot make silk purses out of scores, libretti, and orchestrations that evade aesthetics, emphasize n...

BWW Review: Lise Davidsen Soars Over Naxos in Strauss's ARIADNE at the Met
by Richard Sasanow - March 04, 2022

I flipped over Lise Davidsen when she made her Met debut in QUEEN OF SPADES—the voice, the acting, the overall subtlety--but I was still unprepared for the performance she gave as the Prima Donna who became Princess Ariadne of Crete in Strauss’s ARIADNE AUF NAXOS. She was altogether divine....

BWW Review: Now in the Original French, Met's New Production of Verdi's DON CARLOS Shows Off Impressive Cast
by Richard Sasanow - March 01, 2022

DON CARLOS--Verdi’s original French language version, for the first time at the Met, of the opera better known in these parts as the Italian DON CARLO--was as grim as its setting in the Spanish inquisition in the new David McVicar production introduced last night. And about as long (though for once ...

BWW Review: Opera Schmopera. Taylor Mac and His Collaborators Will Help You Get THE HANG of It
by Richard Sasanow - February 27, 2022

When this year’s PROTOTYPE Festival was put off for a year because of Covid concerns, some of the pieces went into mothballs. Taylor Mac’s THE HANG, under the auspices of HERE, one of New York’s major downtown arts organizations, based in Tribeca, decided to, uh, hang around....

BWW Review: San Diego Opera's MOZART'S COSI FAN TUTTE at San Diego Civic Center
by Ron Bierman - February 17, 2022

I admire the plucky inventiveness of the San Diego Opera. On an annual budget of roughly three percent of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, it has managed to mount a consistently appealing and entertaining variety of productions, traditional and contemporary, in both good times and plague times. The la...

BWW Review: FIDELIO at the Met – Not THE MET – Proves Beethoven's Only Opera Is No Museum Piece
by Richard Sasanow - February 16, 2022

It’s no secret that many of the standard repertoire’s most famous operas had troubled premieres but Beethoven’s FIDELIO had more than its share. Thanks to the efforts of Heartbeat Opera, which performed its revised version at New York’s Met Museum this past weekend (before a short tour), we can see ...

BWW Review: ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE at Tagney Jones Hall
by Erica Miner - February 14, 2022

Bold new production of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s iconic rendering of the classic Greek tragedy...

BWW Review: LA BOHÈME, London Coliseum
by Gary Naylor - February 03, 2022

Another revival of a beautifully realised crowdpleaser that works perfectly in the difficult days of February 2022....

BWW Review: An INTIMATE Look at the New Gordon-Nottage Opera at Lincoln Center Theater
by Richard Sasanow - February 01, 2022

INTIMATE APPAREL appeared this week at LCT’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater, directed adroitly by Bartlett Sher, with a thoughtful libretto by Lynn Nottage based on her award-winning play and a ragtime-inflected score by composer Ricky Ian Gordon....

BWW Review: Costanzo and Bond Join Prokofiev and van Zweden at the Philharmonic
by Richard Sasanow - January 30, 2022

It took longer to read the notes for Joan Tower’s “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No. 1” than it did for the New York Philharmonic under Jaap van Zweden to kick off the first program in its current concert series, “Authentic Selves: The Beauty Within”. But it was a fitting opening for the evening, ...

BWW Review: GARDEN OF FINZI-CONTINIS at City Opera-NYTF Is Too Much of a Good Thing
by Richard Sasanow - January 29, 2022

Ricky Ian Gordon and Michael Korie, in their new opera for New York City Opera and National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene, weren’t the only ones to be inspired by the famed 1962 novel THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS (IL GIARDINO DEI FINZI CONTINI) by Italian Giorgio Bassani. The film version, by Vitto...

BWW Review: Audra McDonald and Dr. Phillips Center Make History with Duke Ellington's BLACK, BROWN & BEIGE
by Aaron Wallace - January 27, 2022

It's not every day that Audra McDonald stands twenty feet in front of you and says, 'Tonight, we are all a part of history.' Then again, it's not every day that music history gets made in Orlando - real-deal, textbook-worthy history - so when it does happen, I reckon Audra McDonald is as eager to be...

BWW Review: LA BOHEME Returns to The MET
by Peter Danish - January 20, 2022

Puccini's 'La Boheme,' returned for its second run of the season this week and cast and conductor delivered the goods. There's nothing to say that has not already been said about La Boheme as an opera and the famous Zeffirelli production, so we won't dwell on it....

BWW Review: New Year, New RIGOLETTO at Met Highlights Good Singing
by Richard Sasanow - January 02, 2022

When I saw the George Grosz-ish curtain that introduced us to the new Barlett Sher “Weimar-inspired” production of Verdi’s RIGOLETTO at the Met on New Year’s Eve, I was excited about what lay ahead. Combined with Verdi’s great score, it seemed bound for success. What followed was disappointing, desp...