Susan Hall
Bio:
Recent Articles:
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Ronald K. Brown's Evidence Troop at Bard Front Page
Classic Grace is Followed by Premiere of Mercy
By: - Jul 07th, 2019Ronald K. Brown’s classic Grace was mounted in the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center of Bard. For the first time, accompanying music was live, an adaptation of the tapes usually run with the dance. Grace was followed by a world premiere of Mercy, a work commissioned by SummerScape at Bard among others.
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La Voix Humaine Mixes Poulenc and Cocteau Front Page
DIVAria Brings Emotion Forward
By: - Jun 28th, 2019The Human Voice/La Voix Humaine by Francis Poulenc and Jean Cocteau melds text from the play by Cocteau with the monologue opera Poulenc was inspired to write. DIVaria and Sergej Productions often work together to present works pared down to their emotional heart. They effectively reach audiences unfamiliar with the opera form by drawing them in to beautiful music and understandable stories.
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Green Wood Cemetery Hosts Voyage Sonique Front Page
Transcendant Music Making at the Angel's Share
By: - Jun 26th, 2019Andrew Ousley has instituted the most exciting and comforting series of concerts in the greater New York area. Using unusual spaces which afford superb acoustics and warming the audience up with excellent whiskeys and cheeses, followed by moonlit walks under a canopy of glorious first growth trees, the audience might end up in Catacombs.
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One-Act Plays at Ensemble Studio Theatre Front Page
Series C Superb
By: - Jun 23rd, 2019The five One-Act plays presented by Ensemble Studio Theatre, Series C, are a crowning achievement in this 37th Annual event.
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Stonewall the Opera, World Premiere Front Page
Iain Bell and Mark Campbell with NY City Opera
By: - Jun 22nd, 2019Stonewall, an opera by Iain Bell with libretto by Mark Campbell, had its world premiere at the New York City Opera. The work was commissioned as part of a commitment by NYCO to produce an LGBT Opera during Pride Month every year. It is a triumph for the artists and the company.
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O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars Front Page
At the Irish Repertory Theatre
By: - Jun 21st, 2019A superb production of Sean O’Casey’s play, The Plough and the Stars, concludes the Irish Repertory Theatre’s O’Casey cycle. Charlotte Moore directs this subtly textured staging, deploying all the tools her theatre and actors have honed over the years.
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Dropping Gumballs, a World Premiere Front Page
Theresa Rebeck Directs Rob Ackerman's Play
By: - Jun 20th, 2019Working Theater Presents the World Premier of Dropping Gumballs on Luke Wilson by Rob Ackerman , directed by Theresa Rebeck. The Working Theater's Mark Present is the producing artistic director and Laura Carbonell Monarque the managing director bring us a play which is true the the vision and mission of the company. Stories reflect a diverse population of the working majority, acknowledging their complexity by creating theater of interest to working people.
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Queen of Conspiracy World Premiere Front Page
Josh Hartwell Delivers at Miners Alley Playhouse
By: - Jun 17th, 2019Leo Mateo, the artistic and Executive Director of the Miners Alley Playhouse, is a fan of the podcast form. One day, he heard about Mae Brussell, a prominent conspiracy theorist who lived from 1922-1988. Her radio broadcasts were extremely popular. She dove into JFK’s murder, giving herself as a birthday present 26 volumes of the Warren Commission report. Her life and impact are explored in Josh Hartwell's highly entertaining and provocative new play.
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Phenomenal Nature at Met Breuer Front Page
Mrinalini Mukherjee, Sculptor
By: - Jun 17th, 2019Phenomenal Nature, the first American retrospective of the remarkable sculptures of Indian artist, Mrinalini Mukherjee, will be on display at the Met Breuer until September 29 and is well worth viewing.
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Paul Pelkonen of Superconductor Front Page
Recalling a Brilliant Music Critic
By: - Jun 17th, 2019Paul Pelkonen, a brilliant critic, died suddenly of heart failure at the age of 46. Paul was one of the great pleasures of reporting on music. He loved it as much as anyone could, and knew more about it than most people. His taste was impeccable.
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Experiencing Barbara Hannigan Front Page
Ojai Music Director 2019
By: - Jun 13th, 2019As a conductor, Barbara Hannigan is full of physical energy and a dynamic beat. Listening to her sing and conduct feels intimate, intuitive, and collaborative. Bowled over by Hannigan’s deep musicality, her sense of the proper degree of vibrato is often overlooked. She has just the right amount of delicate breath in each note, giving the slightest hint of texture to a smooth and pure line. One’s sense of this may be a matter of taste, but the style suits the music she chooses to sing.
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Ojai Festival Magic Making 2019 Front Page
Thomas W. Morris and Barbara Hannigan
By: - Jun 12th, 2019The Ojai Music Festival in California is almost 75 years old. In this magical setting an hour and a half north of Los Angeles, music making is very much here and now. Each year, an artistic director selects a music director and works with her to program four days of performance, talk and film screenings. While coming for one program undoubtedly gives pleasure, the maximum effect of this festival is to be had by immersion. This is not your ordinary concert program. One performance follows another by design and relationships become more clear as the days pass.
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David Lang World Premiere at NY Philharmonic Front Page
A Take Off from Beethoven's Fidelio
By: - Jun 05th, 2019The world premiere of David Lang's prisoner of the state takes place in David Geffen Hall, home of the New York Philharmonic. The 106 member orchestra will perform, but this can hardly be called a concert production. Instead the Hall has been transformed into a prison. Even the instrumentalists on stage are in prison. Costumes, chains and handcuffs were ordered from Bob Barker, the country's leading detention supplier.
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Ensemble Studio Theatre's 37th Marathon Front Page
One Acts Present Dilemmas in Series B
By: - Jun 04th, 2019Dilemmas in all their perplexity, humanity or otherwise, and bewilderment are presented in all five one act plays in Series B of the Ensemble Studio Theatre’s annual one act marathon.
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Experiments at the NY Opera Festival Front Page
A.M. Homes Writes Her First LIbretto
By: - Jun 03rd, 2019Experiments in Opera was co-founded in Brooklyn in 2010 by composers Aaron Siegel, Matthew Welch and Jason Cady. They contributed Chunky in Heat to the New York Opera Festival. It was a wild, wacky and moving work.
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Hamilton by Ishmael Reed Front Page
Full Production to Tag National Tour of Miranda's Version
By: - May 29th, 2019Nuyorican Poets Cafe and writer Ishmael Reed present The Haunting Of Lin Manuel Miranda through June 17th. Amid the flurry of enthusiasm for the Broadway show, Hamilton, Reed lays waste to the show's premises and assumptions, without deriding the talent or intentions of the remarkably gifted Miranda or his cast.
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TON Performs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Front Page
Top Young Musicians under Leon Botstein Reveal Webern and Feldman
By: - May 28th, 2019The Orchestra Now (TON) is brave. In taking on two of the seminal composers of modern music, they tackled the presentation of developing ideas about sound as music, to which the 20th century composers have added new dimensions. Some composers took the sounds out of time. Anton Webern often composed suggesting different tempi measure to measure. While Morton Feldman did not go as far as John Cage, inviting musical artists to perform whatever, whenever, he often suspended his work out of time.
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Young People's Chorus Premieres Ellen Reid Front Page
Joined by Shallaway Choir and Mantra Percussion
By: - May 23rd, 2019The Young People’s Chorus gave their third annual Vocal Resolutions Concert on May 19th at the Gerald Lynch Theater in New York. This group, founded by Francisco Nunez three decades ago, has reached the pinnacle of professional success. They invited an equally celebrated group, the Shalloway Choir from Newfoundland, to join them this year. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2019, Ellen Reid's world premiere composition for YPC was a highlight of the program.
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One Act Play Festival at Ensemble Studio Theatre Front Page
Five Plays on New Relationships
By: - May 22nd, 2019Ensemble Studio Theatre and Radio Drama Network Present Five one-act plays in the superb annual festival. Five writers, five directors and 16 actors bring us an amusing and thoughtful collage of 21st century dilemmas.
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Dominican Heroines at Repertorio Espagnol Front Page
Caridad Svich Tells the Story of Mariposas
By: - May 21st, 2019There had been a surge of interest in the Mariposa sisters since Junio Diaz told their story in his Pulitzer Prize winning, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In a middle-class family, three out of four sisters formed an underground resistance to the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, each in her own way. Minerva studied law and led her group. She could not sit by and leave her children living in a world created by a tyrant.
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Barbara Hannigan at the Ojai Festival Front Page
From The Rake's Progress to a Crazy Girl Suite
By: - May 21st, 2019What makes the Ojai Festival in California unique among festivals? Its Artistic Director continues year after year. Each year a different Music Director is chosen. That person curates the festival as through-performance. You are led by the music on a journey full of surprises and delights.
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Murasaki's Moon at Metropolitan Museum Front Page
Michi Wiancko's Opera Debuts
By: - May 20th, 2019Musical artist Michi Wiancko under the wing of the American Lyric Theater’s development program and backed by Opera America has written a new opera with librettist Deborah Brevoort. The 17th century Astor Chinese Garden Court was the setting of a modern take on the 11th century Tales of Genji. It was written by court lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu who lived between 973-1025 C.E. in Japan. She was the daughter of a petty court noble.
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Kopernikus at the Image Project Room Front Page
Claude Vivier Takes the Fear Out of Death
By: - May 18th, 2019Claude Vivier died in 1983 at age 35. He lived in Paris at the end of his life and was stabbed to death by a young man he had been attracted to. His final opera which told this story before it happened was sitting on his work table. He never heard Koperikus produced, but in this century it has built up a head of steam. Its New York premiere was held at the Image Project Room in Brooklyn.
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Patience & Sarah at Danny Kaye Theater Front Page
Paula Kimper's Folktale of Love Come True
By: - May 14th, 2019Patience & Sarah was one of the first same sex love stories produced in the United States. It was radical subject matter in the 20th century. It hardly seems daring today, as Brokeback Mountain has stormed opera houses and a transgender work, As One, will have a New York premiere later this month. Yet the production by Hunter College and American Opera Projects was lovely and hopeful.
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A New Take on Immigration Front Page
Sea Dog Theater Produces a Winner
By: - May 09th, 2019The Rare Biosphere, a new play by Chris Cragin Day presented by the Sea Dog Theater and directed by Christopher J Domig is a charming and poignant look at at the question of immigration. Through the lives of a very American adolescent lens we are confronted with realities which upset the norm-- and intensify choices
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