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Review: Beczala and Golovatenko Make Met’s CHENIER a Memorable Night under Rustioni
For those of us who like verismo opera—combining the raw emotions of everyday people with historical splendor—but have heard one too many BOHEMEs, TOSCAs, TURANDOTs and BUTTERFLYs in this lifetime, noting Giordano’s ANDREA CHENIER in the Met’s repertoire for this season seemed like a godsend...
Review: PARTENOPE, London Coliseum
Here are all the hallmarks of any good Shakespearean comedy: love polygons, gender trouble and a shipwreck to get things going. However, in Handel’s Partenope there is one crucial difference: everyone here is self-aware....
Review: Strauss’s ARABELLA Has the Music and the Singers—and Old Vienna—at the Met
For all those operagoers tired of classics set in rodeos, Las Vegas or on a space station (Paris has a BOHEME of that ilk), Otto Schenk’s production for ARABELLA, with stage design by Gunther Schneider Siemssen, dating back to 1983, will be a relief. It features a return to “old Vienna,” inclu...
Review: THE SORCERER at Winter Opera
Gina Galati’s delightful Winter Opera company has opened its season with a revival of a rarely seen Gilbert and Sullivan show—The Sorcerer. It premiered in 1877, the first of the grandly popular series of light operas by G & S in which the authors had total control over casting and staging....
Review: DEAD MAN WALKING, London Coliseum
A confession. It’s a guilty pleasure of mine to read the death notices on Wikipedia - I am my mother’s son after all and, without the columns of classifieds in the Liverpool Echo, where else is there to look?...
Review: SAN DIEGO OPERA'S PAGLIACCI at San Diego Civic Theater
San Diego Opera opened its 2025-26 season on a Halloween night with an appropriately disturbing opera about a murderous clown. Its unsavory plot hasn’t kept Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci from becoming one of opera’s most popular creations. The reasons for its success? A can’t-wait-for-it t...
Review: Who Was That MASQUE-d Man? Davone Tines, with Sonnambula Ensemble at the Frick
Some of the audience at the chamber concert at the Frick Collection Museum—that jewel-box museum of art from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century on New York’s Upper East Side—had fought its way there through the runners of the NYC Marathon. What they found was definitely worth the e...
Review: A REGIMENT with Comic Style and High Notes, Thanks to Morley and Brownlee at the Met
It’s hard for a soprano to get a break in Donizetti’s LA FILLE DU REGIMENT, which I caught up with at the Met on Friday evening. Not that Marie—the role of the title, sung at the Met by Erin Morley—doesn’t have some gorgeous music and shenanigans to show off her musical and comic chops in ...
Review: ROMÉO ET JULIETTE at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre
Charles Gounod took Shakespeare’s tale of the star-crossed lovers and adapted it to create the 1867 opera, Roméo et Juliette, with an overture and Shakespeare’s explanatory prologue, delivered by the chorus, followed by a five-act opera, with a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré. ...
Review: PORGY AND BESS at Houston Grand Opera
What did our critic think of PORGY AND BESS at Houston Grand Opera? As Houston performing arts ventures grow for the 2025-26 season, Houston Grand Opera surpasses them all with a thrilling 50th anniversary production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. S...
Review: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, Glyndebourne
Sir Peter Hall's iconic production of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream has achieved legendary status since its premiere in 1981. In 2025, it has lost none of its magic, with the Glyndebourne audience still wide-eyed at the visual feast on stage....
Review: LA BOHÈME, Glyndebourne
PucciniAs the nights draw in, it seems highly appropriate to return to Glyndebourne for the start of its Autumn season and the chilly streets of Puccini’s La bohème. Floris Visser’s production, beautifully revived by Rachael Hewer, has the spectre of death ever-present. In this case, quite li...
Review: ONE-ACT FESTIVAL at Union Avenue Opera
New things at Union Avenue Opera! This wonderful company is extending it’s 31st season with an evening of two one-act operas. ...
Review: THE MAGIC FLUTE, Royal Ballet and Opera
Technically unsurpassed, but is there a chill where its soul should be?...
Review: MARTYRS & RELICS, A Mashup of Buxtehude, Shaw and Balliett at St. John the Divine
How did the martyrs—those Christians and otherwise who have been put to death or endured great suffering defending their beliefs, principles, or causes—meet their ends? As told through Douglas AA Balliett’s MARTYRS & RELICS, which played a handful of performances this week as its world premier...
Review: CARMEN, London Coliseum
If you liked Evita at the Palladium, you'll like Carmen at the Coliseum...
Review: GIUSTINO, Royal Ballet And Opera
Both director and designer have slightly too many ideas about what the show could be, and what is left is unresolved potential....
Review: Spectacular Nadine Sierra Shines in Villazon’s Somnolent SONNAMBULA by Bellini
Sometimes great singing can save a bad production. It happened with the Met’s previous attempt at Bellini’s LA SONNAMBULA, which had been DOA at its premiere, despite a star, cast but rose like a phoenix when it was revived with other stars a year later. This time around, in the misguided, often...
Review: OPERA À LA CARTE'S ORPHEUS IN THE UNDERWORLD at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Del Mar
What did our critic think of OPERA À LA CARTE'S PRODUCTION OF OFFENBACH'S ORPHEUS IN THE UNDERWORLD at St. Peter's Episcopal Church Of Del Mar? With even large companies struggling to survive, why did soprano and voice teacher Abla Hamza decide to found Opera À La Carte?
Her goals were laudable. ...
Review: ZORRO at Arizona Opera
Héctor Armienta’s operatic reimagining of ZORRO is a richly textured work that fuses bravado and romance into a timely meditation on liberty. This tale of dual identity and defiance receives the full operatic treatment (performed in both English and Spanish) in Arizona Opera’s 2025-26 season op...
Review: CINDERELLA, London Coliseum
It’s over 40 years since English National Opera staged Rossini's Cinderella (La Cenerentola) and they open their 2025-26 season with a vibrant new production of the sparkling comedy. After the rocky time the company has had in recent times, it is great to see them having such fun on stage....
Review: Met Season’s First DON GIOVANNI Shows Off a Great Score for the Audience to Relish
Mozart’s DON GIOVANNI was one of my first operas and remains among my favorites, despite its misogyny and the difficulty in putting together the kind of cast that can do justice to the string of show-stoppers in the score. The season's premiere of the opera had much to admire....
Review: Nothing Rusticana about the Met’s Premiere KAVALIER from Bates and Sheer
Anyone familiar with Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prizer-winning THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY must be a bit bewildered at how a 700-page novel could be turned into a 3-hour opera. Or, for that matter, how a superhero named “The Escapist” could be sharing a stage this week with Puccin...
Preview: KAVALIER & CLAY Brings Three Sound Worlds to Met Season-Opener
The forces behind the Met’s latest try at bringing a different (sic: younger) audience to the house, THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY, joined forces at the Guggenheim’s Works & Process series last week to introduce the new work to a receptive crowd. It’s the story of two Jewish cousin...
Review: TOSCA, Starring Anna Netrebko, Royal Ballet and Opera
If you come to opera via film musicals and, later, stage shows, Tosca is amongst the most accessible. The story of the lovers and the evil apparatchik is told at a furious pace, trauma after trauma piling up as the emotional heft becomes all but unbearable. There’s no standing about for twenty min...
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