OPERA - PLAYS

by Steve Callahan - March 02, 2026

Opera is widely considered to be a seasonal flower.  Around the world opera festivals show their shoots in early spring, they blossom in the summer, and they stretch their glory into the fall.  In St. Louis, though, we find one of the few fine opera companies willing to brave the icy blasts of win...

by Franco Milazzo - February 26, 2026

If you have ever suspected that opera might benefit from fewer Valkyries and more vaudeville, Opera Locos is here to confirm your prejudice and then sing it at you in Italian....

by Richard Sasanow - February 23, 2026

Though only a handful of Emily Dickinson’s hundreds of poems were published during her lifetime (more than 1700 others were found posthumously), she is best known as a risk-taking writer whose work straddled the line between the straightforward and the more abstract. Inaddition, she has long been ...

by Cheryl Markosky - March 01, 2026

What did our critic think of LA BOHEME IN CINEMAS at Cinemas Across The UK?...

by Ron Bierman - February 20, 2026

Rossini’s Barber of Seville is a top ten opera in performances. Donors love it for its vocal gymnastics, memorable arias and sparkling melodies. Receptive newcomers like it because of its delightful bubbling overture, the familiar Figaro aria that soon follows, and its simple fast-moving sitcom-li...

by Franco Milazzo - February 07, 2026

Phelim McDermott directing Così fan tutte is a bit like asking a Catholic priest to do Mass in full drag. You know something deliciously outrageous is going to happen. You also know, whether people will like it or not, that it might be exactly what this masterpiece out of step with modern attitudes...

by Franco Milazzo - January 30, 2026

If Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov were a dinner party, Richard Jones’s Russian-language revival at the Royal Opera House would be the dinner date where you arrive bright and curious and leave questioning your life choices, nursing a neat whisky in a corner. This is not an opera that gives up its sec...

by Richard Sasanow - January 27, 2026

The audience at New York’s 92nd Street Y the other night was certainly happy to be at a recital, “From Ordinary Things,” by the trio of soprano Julia Bullock, with her colleagues Seth Parler Wood on cello and pianist Conor Hanick. But there was almost nothing traditional about the proce...

by Michael Higgs - January 24, 2026

A revival of Cal McCrystal’s 2021 production, HMS Pinafore at the London Coliseum charms with wit, a stunning cast, and gorgeous Victorian designs....

by Richard Sasanow - January 22, 2026

The Verdi Messa da Requiem—better known to English speakers as the Verdi Requiem—featuring the Cleveland Orchestra and its Chorus, with a quartet of soloists, breezed into Carnegie Hall the other night and promptly knocked many concert-goers out of their seats....