Front Page
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Tom Krens at The Clark Art Institute
Four Lectures Planned
By: - Oct 01st, 2018Kicking off the series on October 21 is the lecture “Art, Money, Oil, and Guns: The Saga of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.” The lecture traces the narrative arcs of two important elements that combined to produce the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, an extraordinary new museum Tom Krens has called “the Apotheosis.” He is the former director of the Guggenheim Foundation.
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Paula Vogel’s compelling Indecent,
At Victory Gardens Theater.
By: - Oct 01st, 2018Indecent blends time-jumping scenes with an occasional dance routine and klezmer-flavored music. It’s a fine example of a dramatic play with music. The story and its characters are paramount and the music provides a lyrical underpinning. It’s an epic story told on a very personal level.
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Jean-Luc Ponty at The Cabot Theatre
Jazz Violin in Beverly, Mass.
By: - Oct 01st, 2018The 850 seat, Art Deco, Cabot Theatre in Beverly, Mass. has been beautifully renovated. It is proving to be a perfect setting for jazz concerts. Recently we enjoyed an evening with jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. It was a compelling retrospetive of The Atlantic Years.
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'Ol Blue Eyes In South Florida
MNM Theatre Company mounts Frank Sinatra revue
By: - Sep 30th, 2018A quartet of performers in musical tribute find the emotion in songs Frank Sinatra made popular. MNM Theatre Company in West Palm Beach stages a lavish production that will leave you reminiscing. The male cast members offer no impersonations of Ol' Blue Eyes and don't sound like him. However, they, and their female partners, capture the legend's essence.
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Janet McTeer in Bernhardt/Hamlet
Roundabout Theatre Premiere by Theresa Rebeck
By: - Sep 30th, 2018Bernhardt/Hamlet by Theresa Rebeck has arrived at the Roundabout Theatre where it plays in a limited run through November 11. Bernhardt is played by the glorious Janet McTeer, seen as a powerful Nora in Ibsen’s The Doll House and as Albert Nobb's Hubert Page, her Golden Globe and Academy Award nominated role.
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Luigi Pirandello’s Naked
New Translation at Berkshire Theatre Group
By: - Sep 30th, 2018The avant-garde master and Nobel Prize winner, Luigi Pirandello, was a prolific writer including some 40 plays. Other than the iconic Six Characters in Search of an Author they are rarely produced today. Notably Berkshire Theatre Group is presenting a new translation of the 1922 melodrama (his term) Naked.
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Conrad Tao and Bruckner at NY Philharmonic
Shock and Awe Under Jaap Van Zweden
By: - Sep 30th, 2018Conrad Tao’s world premier composition Everything Must Go was performed by the New York Philharmonic and followed without a breath by Anton Bruckner’s powerful Eighth Symphony.
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Detroit Wineries
Not Just Cars from Motown
By: - Sep 29th, 2018Most folks have no idea of Detroit’s winemaking history. In 1702, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac wrote about the vineyards he planted along the Detroit River (some of the first in North America). Prior to Prohibition, Kownacki notes, several Michigan wineries existed. One of these became known as St. Julian Wine Company, which today produces more than 50 different kinds of wine.
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Jay Jaroslav at Gloucester's Trident Gallery
Finding Art Through Covert Operations
By: - Sep 28th, 2018In 1978, at Boston's Atlantic Gallery, Jay Jaroslav displayed large, photo realist facsimiles of appropriated birth certificates. The certificates of infants roughly the artist's age had died within a week of birth. He used them to obtain social security, passports and driver's licenses to create 31 purloined identities. The current exhibition at Trident Gallery, his first solo in three decades, further explores documents and process as conceptual art.
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JACK Quartet at the Catacombs
The Angel's Share Explores Modern Medieval
By: - Sep 28th, 2018We can count the ways the JACK delights in The Catacombs of the Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Depth, breath and height, as far as the strings can reach, up and down. The Catacombs, wrapped in a mysterious yellow light ebbing to darkness added to this moving presentation.
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Miller Theater Premiers Missy Mazzoli
Proving Up Arrives in New York
By: - Sep 27th, 2018Aware that all art forms now compete with Netflix, composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek seek out stories for their musical theater that will attract audiences. Mazzoli, a masterful young composer, can go very dark in tales because her music, in its blocks of beauty no matter what the subject, is compelling and evocative.
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A Classic Play by Ntozake Shange
African-American Shakespeare Company
By: - Sep 27th, 2018Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf is a work of great moment that gave black women a platform, in some ways a pedestal, from which to denounce their double indignity of racial and gender discrimination and announce their worth and beauty.
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The Agitators at Gloucester Stage
Remarkable Friends Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony
By: - Sep 26th, 2018Beyond their names most folks don't know much about abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, and women's suffrage leader, Susan B. Anthony. The remarkable play, The Agitators, by Mat Smart, offers more than a history lesson at Gloucester Stage. It has been given a compact and powerful production sharply directed by Jacqui Parker.
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Ne Quittez Pas at Opera Philadelphia
Patricia Racette Compels as Elle
By: - Sep 26th, 2018Ne Quittez Pas is writ large on a marquee in a hot neighborhood of Philadelphia. Hold on, it says. Don’t leave. Stay on the line. This is a phrase used repeatedly in the old French telephone service, a main character in the opera to unfold inside the club, Theater of the Living Arts, a disco/nightclub near the harbor.
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Shaw's Arms and the Man
Chicago's City Lit Theater
By: - Sep 26th, 2018City Lit Theater’s new production of George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 play, Arms and the Man, takes full advantage of its broad humor. Perhaps Shaw’s most frothy script, director Brian Pastor directs it with panache, although he sometimes lets his cast drift into silliness.
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Pirandello's Naked
Chicago's Trap Door Theatre,
By: - Sep 26th, 2018Pirandello is best known for his 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author, but he wrote a huge volume of novels and short stories, as well as 20 major plays. Trap Door’s production of Naked is engrossing and sometimes confusing, but Martinovich’s direction is smooth.
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Bess Wohl’s Make Believe
World Premiere at Hartford Stage
By: - Sep 25th, 2018Make Believe has potential but it isn’t ready for prime time. When people start taking peeks at their watches during a 90 minute play, it’s a clear sign that something isn’t working.
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Debra Jo Rupp Romps in The Cake
Geffen Playhouse Bakes Hilarous Comedy
By: - Sep 25th, 2018The Barrington Stage Company production of The Cake has gone West young man to LA's Geffen Playhouse. Now another coast shares the delicious comedy of Debra Jo Rupp. This is a run don't walk production.
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Komische Oper, Berlin, Germany
Opening of the Season 2018/19
By: - Sep 25th, 2018Berlin's Komische Oper (Comic Opera) opened its 2018/19 season with some of the most successful productions of the previous season. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 'Zauberflöte' (Magic Flute) and Jerry Bock's 'Anatevka' which is better known as Fiddler On The Roof.
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Glass/Handel at Opera Philadelphia
Barnes Museum Hosts Anthony Roth Costanzo
By: - Sep 25th, 2018Anthony Roth Costanzo has a manly strength and a feminine range, giving surreal power to the voice. Costanzo not only sports this range but is committed to bringing its beauty to an audience unfamiliar with the pleasures of classical music. His alliance with Opera Philadelphia and headline position at the second annual O 18 Festival in Philadelphia is represented in a program at the Barnes Museum.
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Lucia di Lammermoor at Opera Philadelphia
Dark Yet Entrancing
By: - Sep 25th, 2018Rumors that Gaetano Donizetti was of Scotch origin swirled over the Italian countryside when his opera Lucia di Lammermoor was first produced. They were untrue. Now Laurent Pelly gives us a grim, grey countryside to match the mood of the opera's heroine. Brenda Rae triumphs in the role at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia.
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Sky on Swings at Opera Philadelphia
World Premier of Lembit Beecher's opera
By: - Sep 24th, 2018Sky on Swings is a collaborative opera. The three principal artists, Lembit Beecher, Hannah Moscovitch and Joanna Settle have worked together for more than a year to bring a musical portrait of death-by-Alzheimer’s to the stage.
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35MM: A Musical Exhibition
Unconventional Show in Boca Raton
By: - Sep 23rd, 2018Entertaining musical features electric dancing, singing and stunning visuals 35MM: A Musical Exhibition fuses photography and musical theater. Measure for Measure Theatre Company in South Florida, for the most part, scores a hit with their Ryan Scott Oliver/Matthew Murphy show
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NAT by Verlon Brown at Theater for a New City
Directed by Rome Neal at Theater for a New City
By: - Sep 21st, 2018Remembering the Unforgettable Nat King Cole. New to the professional stage, Actor/Writer Verlon Brown brings the life of an extraordinary man to Theater for the New City, under the seasoned direction of Rome Neal.
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Jaap van Zweden at the New York Philharmonic
A New Era Begins
By: - Sep 21st, 2018Opening night at the New York Philharmonic is a yearly tradition an occasion for fat cat donors to dine on the Promenade of Lincoln Center's David Geffen Hall, and for ordinary critics (like your humble scribe) to put on suits and hobnob with each other before the performance. This year's ceremonies, held Thursday night, were also notable as it marked the long-awaited official debut of Jaap van Zweden, the orchestra's new music director.
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