Madame White Snake begins with a borrowed umbrella and ends with a storm to drown the world. Opera Boston's international commission, composed by Zhou Long and librettoed by retired Boston trial lawyer Cerise Lim Jacobs, presents a rather structured, symmetrical argument between Love and Truth, with no clear winner but a vast body count.
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There are conflict-of-interest concerns regarding the firm hired to recover City Hall's deleted emails. Hmm... [Boston Globe]
Did Tweet the Giraffe die from something he ate on a movie set? Or did Kevin James murder him? Hmm... [Boston Herald]
A clever kid didn't want to be in kindergarten, so he walked home by himself. Hmm! [Somerville Journal]
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Results tagged “opera”
What draws young people into the opera, leads them to pour their fresh talent into the old wineskins of a foreign art? And why does a monolingual schlub like this Bostonist--whose primary engagement with culture is a daily trip to 7-Eleven--find joy in watching and half-understanding them? And why don't we all live in Fort Point?
Discretion is the dumber part of valor.
Love can change the world. Distilling years of Roman history into a single, frenzied day of dagger-brandishing and lyre-strumming, Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea demonstrates this platitude, and also an important corollary: Love doesn't care whether the world changes for the better or the considerably worse. Poppea and Nerone are both the latter.
Opera
Bedřich Smetana's The Bartered Bride calls for a dude in a bear costume, the most tuneful stuttering you'll ever hear, and the consumption of gallons of imaginary beer. Opera Boston places the 19th-century Czech comic opera in the Depression (the previous one), back when selling women was still hilarious. Pretty singing, with baseball. Cutler Majestic Theatre, 219 Tremont St, 7:30 pm. $29-$114.
Every review of Dimtri Shostakovich’s opera The Nose is obligated to contain at least one nose joke, so I’ll get mine out of the way now: The spirited Opera Boston production at the Cutler Majestic Theatre makes the case for this rarely performed modernist masterpiece to enjoy a higher profile - get it? - in the repertoire.
Thérèse Raquin has been adapted for the stage before—by Emile Zola himself, and by Harry Connick, Jr., among many others—but the opera being performed at the Boston University Theatre* feels like a movie. Domino players' arms are choreographed like stop-motion puppets and, all around them, the meticulous grime and uncanny colors look post-production. Tobias Picker's displaced film noir score is lush, often frantic, and always on the verge of shrieking—and when it finally does, at the murderous close of the first act, it never quite stops.
Spanish Sirens: Ravel's L'Heure Espagnole & Excerpts from Carmen
"Virtue" was the theme of last Wednesday's Opera Boston Underground show, and its seven varieties were interpreted with varying degrees of precision by seven young singers. Baritone Graham Wright took a direct route to Courage, "Mut" from Schubert's Winterreise, and Julia Mintzer personified at least three or four virtues all at once, waiting for her husband to return from the Crusades in Henri Duparc's "Au pays ou se fait la guerre." There was lonely tower, a white moon, cooing birds in a willow, but the results of Mintzer's brooding, seductive mezzo were more immediate and vivid than all that. We neglected our Great Pumpkin Ale and allowed our artichoke dip to cool.
7pm, 21+, $10 (no advance tickets, and there's always a line)
A couple of weekends ago, this Bostonist's mom dropped off a children's book, withdrawn from the New Britain Public Library, titled Adventures of Richard Wagner. The mischievous protagonist, "little Dicker," slides down banisters, carries wet puppies in his woolen cap, and hand-copies the score of Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz. The last few pages had been pulled out, so who knows how this ends?
Friday night's installment of the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music was all about text. Whole, grammatical sentences; comprehensible, English, (mostly) well-enunciated; no Italian arias, no liturgical Latin, no repurposed Sanskrit, neither Einstein nor beach—this is not what Bostonist has come to expect from classical music, contemporary or otherwise.
Giuseppe Verdi's rapidly complicated, frequently histrionic, infrequently performed opera Ernani plays like a telenovela on fast-forward with the volume turned up.
In Mozart's delightfully farcical opera Così fan tutte, everyone is culpable. The title—roughly, "They're all like that"—refers to the fickleness of Woman, the hypothetical Fiordiligi and Dorabella in particular (sung by Leah Sapko and Kristina Reagle in Thursday's performance) but their fiancés Ferrando and Guglielmo (David Vogel and Jonathan Nussman) likewise prove themselves to be utter cads in the course of their very complicated attempt to prove the sisters' fidelity.
March 18, 19, and 22 at 8 p.m., $6-$24 (20% discount if purchased through the Juventas web site)
Upstairs was the teeming Cambridge Common; outside, the usual smokers' conversations. "Dude, you spit on my nachos." "No, I spit next to your nachos." And downstairs, Opera Boston Underground had returned to the Lizard Lounge for another well-attended performance.
Women ended up on tables, a lot: in rapture, in protest, in flagrante delicto, and asleep. As the Cutler Majestic's red velvet curtain rose last night, we saw the heroine in a heap of wedding dress on a dining table, an image that echoed throughout the opera. Semele, the reluctant bride, is the best-developed character in the work, foolish, but sympathetic, but so petulant, even before she leaves the groom at the altar and runs off with a married deity—even before she opens her mouth.
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