OPERA THEATER REVIEWS

If you're a fan of Puccini-esque music and the “magic realism” of the great Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Daniel Catan's FLORENCIA EN EL AMAZONAS may be for you. Others might find the opera--which had its New York premiere at New York City Opera's home at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose...

BWW Review: THE GONDOLIERS - Comic Opera At Its Finest Celebrating its 40th year, The Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Austin brings us a world class production of THE GONDOLIERS. A sumptuous feast for the senses, the entire show is on point perfection....

PATIENCE & SARAH—at least in the production of this chamber opera seen this past week at the Players Theatre in Greenwich Village, as part of the New York Opera Fest and 18 years after its premiere at Lincoln Center Festival—is a beautiful but somewhat lopsided affair. While it tells of the love...

The weather, the stars and “the stars” aligned the other night in Central Park, when the Metropolitan Opera performed its annual recital at SummerStage. Usually home to more pop culture performers, it turned out to be the perfect venue for introductions to some unfamiliar yet striking performers...

New Zealand Opera's new production of Mozart's final opera The Magic Flute is an absolute delight. The Magic Flute (or Die Zauberflote) tells the story of Prince Tamino's quest for his Princess Pamina through a fairytale dream-world where she is held captive by the wizard Sarastro. Aided by his impu...

“Bride's side or groom's? I'm Count Almaviva,” said the elegant actor as we entered what, we are told, is the Count's summer palace. “Bride's side or groom's?” says the seductive brunette in a bath towel, stepping out of the tub. She introduces herself as the Countess, Rosina. Upstairs, down...

Children of All Ages! In the center ring was a death-defying feat of legerdemain guaranteed to bring a smile to your face, a tap to your toe and an audience to its feet. And for all those new-opera fanatics who think that the 19th century doesn't have anything to say to a Millennials--LoftOpera bro...

Salman Rushdie's tale of love and vengeance becomes a powerful opera in this commissioned work at Opera Theatre of St. Louis....

To celebrate their 70th anniversary, Welsh National Opera returns to the Birmingham Hippodrome to perform Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci; the same operas the company performed for their debut performance. A novice opera-goer, I was intrigued to experience the opulence and spectacle of the WNO...

'ARIADNE ON NAXOS' balances wondrously between classic beauty and parody....

For a director known as opera's bad boy, Calixto Bieito turned to something awfully familiar in CARMEN for his US debut. Then again, he didn't actually show up for it, tied up with a new production of Aribert Reimann's LEAR in Paris and dispatching one of his top collabortors, Joan Anton Rechi, to p...

“There is no sense in which [the play] THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST needs to be an opera.” Those words aren't mine, but come directly from an article by Paul Kilbey in the program at last week's U.S. stage premiere of Irish composer/lyricist Gerald Barry's 2010 opera THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING E...

Early in May, Gustavo Dudamel—the brilliant music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic—was booed at the opening of TURANDOT at the Vienna State Opera purportedly for playing too loud. There were no such complaints when he returned to Disney Hall in Los Angeles on May 20, with a grand, finely...

Opera Theatre of St. Louis continues its forty-first season with another remarkably fine production-Verdi's Macbeth....

American Premiere of Short Opera by British Composer Robin Haigh...

OTSL has opened a delicious 'La boheme'....

On the evening of May 16th 2016 at the Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center, the beloved troupe that was recognized as 'America's National Ballet Company' in 2006 by the United States Congress proved once again that the American Ballet Theatre is indeed a treasure. Dancegoers in dazzling forma...

The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutte, were the result of the collaboration Mozart and da Ponte....

Under the umbrella of the New York Opera Fest, The Center for Contemporary Opera presented an hour's worth of excerpts from THE WILD BEAST OF THE BUNGALOW, an episodic opera still in development by composer Rachel J. Peters and (the omnipresent) librettist Royce Vavrek. It was, frankly, spellbinding...

As part of the New York Opera Fest, Brooklyn's scrappy Vertical Player Repertory ventured into Manhattan's Christ and St. Stephen's Church near Lincoln Center, bringing with it a true rarity: Giovanni Pacini's bel canto-ish MALVINA DI SCOZIA, which dates from 1851. And while it was good to hear a wo...

State Opera has pulled out all the stops for this opera, which has been five years in the making....

Co-Opera and the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of South Australia have joined forces to perform The Mikado....

“Park and bark” is a term usually used derogatively when speaking about opera--a kind of old-style singing that involves standing still and bursting forth in song, with little or no acting skills involved. There certainly wasn't anything old-fashioned about the operas or the group of young singe...

Those of us with long enough memories can recall some exciting nights at Opera Orchestra of New York's concerts at Carnegie Hall, with Eve Queler at the helm. It's reputed that Donizetti's PARISINA D'ESTE made quite a stir with Montserrat Caballe in the spotlight in 1974--but anyone expecting histor...

Director Francesca Zambello's Gotterdammerung is truly awesome-in both the original and contemporary senses of the word.  The conclusion of a four-part epic, this six-hour installment depicts the final struggle for ownership of a magical ring whose owner might rule the world-but which also holds a ...