Michael Gordon News

BroadwayWorld has just learned that Oklahoma! is making its way back to New York. St. Ann's Warehouse and Eva Price will present a limited run of the Bard SummerScape production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, directed by Daniel Fish.

Following a five year search for a permanent home, Target Margin Theater (Founding Artistic Director David Herskovits, Associate Artistic Director Moe Yousuf, General Manager Lu Liu) is proud to present the world premiere of Pay No Attention To The Girl (March 29-April 21), which marks the Company's debut off-Broadway performances in their new 3,250 sq. ft. home in Brooklyn. Directed by Founding Artistic Director David Herskovits, Pay No Attention To The Girl is an interlocking set of tales about the deceptions of the sexes that lead us deep into the labyrinth of The Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Silk Road, MENA (Middle Eastern / North African), and South Asian stories.

The little OPERA theatre of ny (LOTNY), in collaboration with New York based period ensemble New Vintage Baroque, presents the New York City Premiere of Piramo e Tisbe at Baruch Performing Arts Center, 55 Lexington Avenue, NYC, from March 22-25, 2018, with performances on Thursday through Saturday at 7:30pm and Sunday at 3pm.  Tickets are $35 and are available at https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/35006.   Based upon the story of Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid's Metamorphoses with a libretto by Marco Coltellini, Piramo e Tisbe is byJohann Adolph Hasse, a pivotal opera composer of the 18th Century celebrated for his sweet and tender melodies. Sung in Italian with English supertitles.

Miami City Ballet's Program Three features the highly anticipated world premiere of One Line Drawn commissioned exclusively for the company by the Harris Theater of Music and Dance in Chicago with choreography by Brian Brooks. In addition to Brook's premiere, the Program also juxtaposes the old and the new, featuring George Balanchine's classic masterpiece Theme and Variations, with soaring music by Tchaikovsky, as well as Jerome Robbins' lighthearted The Concert (or, the Perils of Everybody), universally acclaimed as the funniest of all comic ballets.

In many areas of the arts in New York, January is a quiet month. But in the opera world, the last few weeks certainly have been jumping. It has also been a fine time for asking 'What is an Opera?' For me, January started with Prototype 2018's ACQUANETTA and ended this past weekend--with many in between--with New York City Opera's 'first mariachi opera,' CRUZAR LA CARA DE LA LUNA (TO CROSS THE FACE OF THE MOON).

Miami City Ballet, one of the country's premier ballet companies, is proudly looking ahead to upcoming performances with two world-class cultural festivals. In May, the company will open Charleston's 42nd Spoleto Festival USA before traveling to Paris for performances with the prestigious Les Etes de la Danse Festival.

Following an acclaimed five-week season launch in New York City,Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater will continue to grace stages from coast to coast during a 21-city North American tour beginning January 30th in Chapel Hill, NC. On February 6th, a week-long engagement at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. opens with a gala to benefit Ailey's D.C. programs, including the creation of new works, arts-in-education activities, and scholarships to talented young area dancers to attend The Ailey School in New York.

Mikaela Bennett with NYFOS; photo by Karli Cadel On February 27 at 8:00 p.m., New York Festival of Song and Merkin Concert Hall at Kaufman Music Center present a new program devised by Steven Blier, entitled, simply, PROTEST. A cast of young, diverse and brilliant singers that includes Mikaela Bennett who just wowed the world in Michael Gordon's opera Acquanetta at the Protoype Festival performs songs by a panorama of composers, from Marc Blitzstein and Joni Mitchell to Randy Newman and Mohammed Fairouz. (View the complete program below.)

The little OPERA theatre of ny(LOTNY), in collaboration with New York based period ensemble New Vintage Baroque,presents the New York City Premiere of Piramo e Tisbe at Baruch Performing Arts Center, 55 Lexington Avenue, NYC, from March 22-25, 2018, with performances on Thursday through Saturday at 7:30pm and Sunday at 3pm. Tickets are $35 and are available at https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/35006.

Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, the New World Symphony, America's Orchestral Academy (NWS), presents its seventh annual New Work performance on Saturday, February 3, 2018 at 7:30 p.m. at the New World Center. New Work is dedicated to commissioning and premiering new pieces from high-profile and developing artists across a range of genres, exploring intersections between music, theater, dance, poetry, video, lighting, and other art forms. This year's program opens with a world premiere, multidisciplinary performance of selections from Glimpse of the Big Picture, conceived, scored, and authored by NWS Artistic Director/Co-Founder Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT). Divided into three parts, the performance brings music together with the spoken word, featuring MTT as speaker. The 2018 New Work program also includes two NWS commissions: composer Ted Hearne and filmmaker Jonathan David Kane's 2017 crowdsourced, multimedia symphony, Miami in Movements, in a revised version; and the world premiere of The Inherent Sadness of Low-Lying Areas, a short play by playwright Christopher Wall featuring music by a variety of composers, from Bach to Saariaho.

The Winnipeg New Music Festival's (WNMF) unique relationship with Iceland its innovative composers and their uniquely evocative music has evolved over a number of seasons. This year is the 100th anniversary of an important milestone in Icelandic history: the Danish Icelandic Act, a pivotal point in Iceland's history and journey to independence. In celebration of that event, the 2018 Festival (running Jan. 27-Feb. 2, 2018) presents multiple world premieres by Icelandic composers including a major new work for orchestra and choir by Hilmar rn Hilmarsson on January 31.

The internationally-renowned Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater brings six performances of inspiring, timely works to the Auditorium Theatre, the company's Chicago home for nearly half a century, on March 7-11.

Nashville Ballet will premiere Light / The Holocaust & Humanity Project this February, an internationally acclaimed contemporary ballet that journeys through one of history's darkest hours to ultimately shine a spotlight on the triumph of the human spirit. Presented as part of Nashville Ballet's annual Attitude series, Light / The Holocaust & Humanity Project comes to Music City from Ballet Austin Artistic Director Stephen Mills February 9-11, 2018, at TPAC's Polk Theater.

'Memories of Things Past'--'A la recherche du temps perdu' in Proust-speak--and very much in the past it was, for me at least, going in to ACQUANETTA, the piece that opened this year's iteration of the PROTOTYPE. Its name and purported subject--horror films--conjured up childhood memories for me. Musically and dramatically, however, ACQUANETTA--by Michael Gordon, composer (of 'Bang on a Can' fame), Deborah Artman, librettist (ditto)--was very much in the present and in a class of its own, seen January 10 at the Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center.

Following a five-week season launch in New York City, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater will continue to grace stages from coast to coast, arriving at Jacksonville's Times-Union Center on February 20, 2018 for one performance only.

The 2018 ASCAP Foundation Musical Theatre Workshop, in partnership with The Wallis and Universal Theatrical Group (UTG), returns to Beverly Hills on February 7 9, 2018. The three-day annual workshop gives select composers and lyricists the opportunity to present new original musical works-in-progress for professional critique.

Famed Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater marks its annual Kennedy Center engagement, February 6 11, with seven magnetic performances on the Opera House stage. Led by Artistic Director Robert Battle, the company's performances include two D.C. debuts, three new productions, and a total of 10 works by a range of diverse choreographers. Alvin Ailey's American masterpiece Revelations will be performed as the finale for all seven programs.

Bang on a Can and the Jewish Museum's 2017-18 concert season, which focuses on pioneering female artists, continues on Thursday, February 22, 2018 at 7:30pm with a performance by Iva Bittov . Bittov is known foremost as a violinist-vocalist whose distinct music blends styles from many global music cultures eastern European folk, western classical, Indian, Middle Eastern, and American rock 'n roll.

With less than a week until the opening of New York's PROTOTYPE 2018, I was Skype-ing with the producers--no, not Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick--but Jecca Barry (of Beth Morrison Projects, BMP) and Kim Whitener (of HERE), who seem pretty calm. (Actually, they're two of four producers, the others being the eponymous Beth Morrison and Kristin Martin of HERE.) What's to be nervous about? After all they only have 8 new-opera/new-theatre productions (plus other events) opening between January 9th and 20th, including a couple of world premieres.

The Kitchen presents the world premiere of Jim Findlay's Electric Lucifer, an experimental rock opera based on the 1970s concept albums of the late Canadian electronic music pioneer Bruce Haack.