That’s The Three Penny Opera. While four “sous” wouldn’t get you in the door, the price of admission was far less than the usual offering at this lofty altar to…
Category: Staged Operas
The Bartered Bride still charms at Garsington
Paul Curran’s 2019 The Bartered Bride, set in late 1950s Britain, makes a welcome return to the Wormsley Estate in Rosie Purdie’s likeable revival. With a new cast, this folksy…
Woman at Point Zero at the Royal Opera House
Nawal El Saadawi’s 1975 novel, Woman at Point Zero, presents an ‘eve of death-row’ narrative which is a chilling indictment of patriarchal society. An Egyptian woman, Firdaus, has been convicted…
UK premiere of Barnum’s Bird at the Royal College of Music
‘I believe hugely in advertising and blowing my own trumpet, beating the gongs, drums, to attract attention to a show.’ So wrote Phineas Taylor Barnum to a publisher in 1860, adding, ‘As…
Treemonisha 2.0 in Joplin’s Hometown
It takes nearly forty minutes to get to the music Scott Joplin himself wrote for Treemonisha at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and I don’t mean that as a bad…
Saint Louis: Oh, Susannah!
From the downbeat of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ riveting production of Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, there was a palpable electricity in the air. In fact, even before the first note…
Visually arresting Candide from Welsh National Opera
In the light of today’s cultural, financial and social turmoil, Welsh National Opera’s new production of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide is just the sort of tonic everyone needs. If its overworked…
The Queen of Spades at The Grange Festival
There’s nothing particularly Russian, or Slavic, about Paul Curran’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades at The Grange Festival, though it’s heartening to see singers displaced from their…
Country Life: L’elisir d’amore at Longborough Festival Opera
After John Doyle’s spartan Werther at Grange Park Opera, in which the locale was essentially a symbolic representation of the lovelorn protagonist’s mind, at Longborough Festival Opera for their production…
Rossini’s The Barber of Seville at the Princeton Festival
Each summer the Princeton Festival stages an opera, this year an exuberant production of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia under the tent on the Morven Museum Grounds. Though it is…