Criticultura em Portugal

Millennial values were in vogue at the Friday performance of Handel’s Aci, Galatea, e Polifermo (1708), an early work by the composer composed during his Roman phase. The work resides somewhere between oratorio and opera, with operatic arias and plot, but without full staging. The recreation in Brooklyn was co-produced by countertenor superstar Anthony Roth Costanzo, known for his edgy risk-taking, including a shaved, nude pharoah in Akhenaten , a Philip Glass opera soon to be seen at the Met. This Handel production was intriguingly cosponsored by National Sawdust (a Brooklyn hipster performing venue known for acoustic, alternative, and world music) and the venerable SF Bay Area Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, a long-established classical early music orchestra and chorus. So its roots crossed from traditional classical music into performance trends and gender/power politics of our own day. This hybrid approach was on full display in Friday’s performance. The opera tells th...

Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) has always fallen just short of the reverence accorded to O’Neill, Williams, and Miller among twentieth century American playwrights. Her career was complicated by well-publicized spats with critics, then McCarthy era blacklisting resulting from her Communist Party membership in the 1930’s. Yet she became a fervent anti-Nazi, even when Stalin was in league with Hitler. She was also accused of falsifying her story in the supposed autobiographical memoir Pentimento (later made into the hit film Julia ). Despite all this personal ambiguity, she created very well-crafted plays that, while lacked the Freudian probing of O’Neill and Williams, fearlessly tackled the moral issues of her time. The Children’s Hour (1934) chillingly foresees McCarthyism, as two teachers are accused of a lesbian affair by a young student, and Toys in the Attic (1960) addresses incest and transracial love. The Little Foxes (1939) is an intense, rapidly paced drama about the finan...

Sweat , Lynn Nottage’s 2015 play about struggling factory workers in Reading, PA, was prescient in predicting all the recent post-election conversation about the woes of the working class. Given its topicality, it was therefore not surprising that the original off-Broadway play returned this year for an on-Broadway run. Nottage was known to me for Ruined , a harrowing account of rape in the Congo. This play did not quite duplicate the unyielding intensity of the earlier effort, and often felt like she was observing and analyzing the characters, rather than truly being one with them as in Ruined . Sweat tells the story of a group of mixed race friends and family who work at a local tooling plant and hang out at a local bar to bond, fight, gossip, and escape their exhausting, humdrum, but well-paying factory jobs. The tragic plot is driven by both the impending downsizing of the factory and the rise of one of the friends into junior management. I wish I had seen Sweat before the elect...

The biennial Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) has grown in recent years from a geeky specialist  gathering to a large affair that brings in international tourists and appeals to a diverse range of tastes. It is perhaps the best place in the US to see a great range of music from medieval to classical periods at venues ranging from 25 to 800 people. I had a chance to sample a variety of BEMF wares in mid-June. Predictably, the performances and programming varied in execution and creativity. The highlight of each festival is a fully staged performance of a baroque opera, often very obscure, as was this year’s Le Carnaval de Venise by André Campra (1660-1744). Campra was of the generation between Lully and Rameau. He was music director at Notre Dame de Paris, and was later director of music at Versailles for Louis XV. He favored the op éra-ballet form, elaborate pageants with singing, dancing, exotic plots (often set in foreign locales), and rich orchestration. Le Carnaval was ...