Criticultura em Portugal

While attending the immensely enjoyable Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera, I reflected on why opera is often not so entertaining. Part of this is a mismatch of directors' vision with the essential nature of the operas. Let's take the three greatest opera composers: Wagner, Mozart, and Verdi. Wagner's operas are challenging, highly symbolic, prompt intellectual reflection, and often have too many ideas, notes, and minutes for their own good, similar to such filmmakers as Andrei Tarkovsky, Lars von Trier, and Kenji Mizoguchi. This makes Wagner's operas very open to interpretive, daring, allegorical, and symbolic productions. Mozart, much like film's Ingmar Bergman, strips his art down to the emotions and interactions of real people (Mozart much more optimistically than Bergman). Mozart opera directors are therefore wise not to interfere too much, and let us experience the human insights without over-interpretation. Verdi's operas have always seemed to me more en...

One of the great things about New York is the opportunity to indulge in artistic themes, with and without a ticket. For example, last Friday evening, after singing in my choir's service and walking down Columbus Ave. to the subway, I passed a bearded man in a woolen coat, dragging a 12 foot crucifix along the sidewalk, presumably after some Good Friday service-tableau-pageant. He was texting someone with his off hand (the one not supporting the cross). Then on the train home, I sat across from a yuppie couple from Connecticut. They were returning from a shopping/dining expedition to Manhattan, and bemoaned that the maitre d' at their chosen upscale restaurant did not spontaneously offer them his business card, their mark of status achieved in several other notable restaurants. This put the woman in a funk, saying "Why do we only get cards from restaurants which aren't the ones we need to get cards from?". Her well dressed 6 year old slept in her lap as she and h...

The current Broadway run of Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George  (1984) is notable for a couple of reasons. It reopens the venerable, Tiffany-clad Hudson Theater (fresh colors, still limited knee-room), dark for four decades, and features the first Broadway musical run for Jake Gyllenhaal. Both debuts were terrific. Sunday in the Park with George  exemplifies the strengths and limitations of Stephen Sondheim, our greatest musical theater composer. Both the concept and much of the execution are cerebral (in a good way) and challenging. Hummable tunes are few and far between, as are emotional gutshots, but you exit the theater thinking about the meaning of the play and analyzing the choices the composer and director made. This musical arose from an unlikely source, after Sondheim saw the famous pointillist painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte  (1884) by Georges Seurat at the Art Institute of Chicago and was provoked about who all the...

Tracy Letts, famous for the Pulitzer-winning  August: Osage County (2008) is a playwright whose characters reflect both the conservative stability of his Midwest origins (Oklahoma) and the resultant disruption and pain to families when inevitable change occurs, whether due to illness, bad luck, or, as in Man from Nebraska (2003), existential angst. The play centers around Ken Carpenter, a solid Midwestern insurance salesman who suddenly doubts everything—his religious faith, his marriage, his values of hard work. Shockingly (to his family) he runs off to London, indulges his artistic side, and falls in with counterculture types. The play ends ambiguously, with Ken rejecting neither his Nebraska values nor his new independence. The play does not have the pointed edge of August . The characters are gentler, more dull in a lovable sort of way. Letts, who was inspired by Tennessee Williams, clearly emulated Williams’ operatic, overheated style four years later in August (by the way...

Wallace Shawn’s Evening at the Talk House (2015) begins very promisingly, with a lovely sense of anticipation. We enter the small theater walking through and amidst actors already mingling in the living room of the intimate surround-set. Wow, there is Wallace Shawn ( My Dinner with Andre ) and Matthew Broderick, two feet away from me!  What might come of this glam-casual NYC cocktail party? What follows is a dark, unsatisfying play. It opens with an overly long monologue by Mr. Broderick, playing a laconic playwright-in-decline, who goes on about the decline of theater, his past successes, the decline of culture in the world, etc. Then the cocktail party of over-the-hill theater performers and producers gets going, largely with chit-chat, interrupted by Dick’s (Mr. Shawn) entrance in pajamas, with bandages on his face. As the two hour play unfolds, the casual conversation reveals Mr. Shawn’s view of the dark dystopian side of our society. The old and past-their-prime (like Dick) a...