Criticultura em Portugal

Over Thanksgiving, I spent a few days in NYC, enjoying two films and four plays. More on the films in a later review, but here is an overview of the plays I saw, going from least to most compelling.  Ragtime  is a well known musical, especially among musical theater fans. It is based on the excellent 1975 novel by E.L. Doctorow, chronicling the lives of several characters from the early 1900s, both imagined and real (e.g. Harry Houdini, JP Morgan, the anarchist Emma Goldman). The creative thing about the novel is the way it seamlessly interweaves the famous characters with the invented ones. The book centers around a famed white socialite who bears a child with a black jazz entertainer, Coalhouse Walker, leading to numerous societal, sometimes violent consequences in a racist society. I really enjoyed the book when I read it years ago, as it had a creative mix of sex, history, drama, and intrigue. The acclaimed novel gave rise to a so-so movie in 1981, then a musical in 1996. ...

The second opera I saw this year in Bayreuth was a technologically innovative new "enhanced" production of Richard Wagner's  Parsifal (1882) , staged by the director Jay Scheib, and conducted by the Spaniard Pablo Heras Casado. I almost always enjoy this opera, and have probably seen five productions around the world. Musically, Wagner pushes the use of chromatic harmony to extremes, and achieves a ritual timelessness with the recurring themes. Plotwise, not much happens. A group of knights is charged with protecting the Holy Grail, Jesus's cup from the last supper. They do this by ritualistically revealing it daily in a ceremony. However, the knights now seem to be aging and declining, and their leader Amfortas has been wounded with a spear; his wound is agonizing and unhealing. A new boy Parsifal arrives, clueless (he is a tenor) and ignorant of the rituals. He sacrilegiously kills a swan. He undergoes an odyssey/initiation, repelling the seduction attempts of the v...

My most recent journey to the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany was eventful, mostly because of some challenges getting there and because of the innovative use of Enhanced Reality glasses in the Parsifal  production, which I will review in a later blog. I've done this pilgrimage three times now, with about 7 years between each visit. The experience remains atmospheric and oddly comforting, as I easily re-settled into traditions that have persisted since Richard Wagner founded the festival in 1876. Wagner, after initially trying to persuade Munich to build him a proper opera house for his spectacles (the Ring of the Niebelung was about to premiere), he gave up and instead built his new "shrine" in the sleepy town of Bayreuth, in the farmland north of Nürnberg in Bavaria. This was a good decision, as he could 1. have complete control over the construction, and 2. get festival goes away from the congested cities, so they could concentrate 100% on his music. Traveling ther...

I recently bopped over to Rome for 3 days to indulge in some culture and see some lesser-known sites, trying to avoid the hordes of people already doing the Spanish Steps, Colosseum, and Forum. I usually try to avoid European capitals in the summer, but here the motivation was a once-in-a-lifetime exhibit of paintings of Caravaggio, aka Michelangelo Merisi di Caravaggio (1571-1610), one of my top 5 artists. He was hugely influential in his short lifetime, revered by popes and the public alike, despite a tendency to drinking, whoring, consorting with gay criminals, and general criminal and sociopathic behavior. The exhibit united 25 paintings from all over the world, most never before seen together. When combined with his famous paintings in Roman churches and a couple I saw this spring in London, it allowed me to view about 75% of his work, a wonderful experience.  Born seven years after the death of Michelangelo, Caravaggio took painting to new heights of drama. He had a knack of ...

On my recent London trip, I experienced two visions of early twentieth century decadence: the musical Cabaret  and, on the way back, the Metropolitan Opera's live broadcast DVD version of Richard Strauss' Salome . Despite the efforts of the Cabaret production team to shock us with 21st century sexuality, the 1905 Strauss opera had the greater impact and shock value. This production of  Cabaret  has been playing for over a year in London, with an evolving cast. You enter the theater by descending a narrow, vaguely ominous stairway, and traverse several smoky corridors before emerging into a modified theater in which the ground floor is set up as a club, with small tables, people drinking cocktails, and entertainment by scantily clad musicians playing jazz on accordions, violins, and clarinets. This is a memorable intro to the portrayed decadence of 1930's Berlin, the setting of the play. I was seated in the "club" area, but other patrons were seated in traditional ...