Criticultura em Portugal

Fiddler on the Roof Composed by Jerry Bock Lyrics by Sheldon Harnick Book by Joseph Stein Directed by Bartlett Sher Starring Yehezkel Lazarov Denver Center for the Performing Arts June 14, 2019 Fiddler on the Roof is one of those beloved musicals that often seems beyond criticism, enshrined in the heart of many a junior actor and musician from their high school days. While there was a long history in New York of Yiddish Theater (this was famed conductor Michael Tilson Thomas’ family background), this had vanished by the 1930s. That is one reason why the premiere of Fiddler in 1964 was such a big deal. For the Manhattan Jewish theater audience, it was a nostalgic return not just to their family origins in Russia of the late 1800s, but was a revival of Jewish theater itself. Of course no play is really beyond critique or revision. The current US touring production of Fiddler ran on Broadway from 2015-2016 and has been popular on tour ever since. I caught up to it in ...

a prisoner of the state Composed by David Lang New York Philharmonic Orchestra Conducted by Jaap von Sweeden Starring Julie Mathevet, Eric Owens, Alan Oke, and Jerrett Ott Geffen Theater, Lincoln Center, Manhattan June 7, 2019 It’s rare to see a serious work of art express terminal joy these days. While popular culture still provides audiences with ample happy endings—fantasy-hero-terminator movies, Broadway musicals, women’s fiction, children’s literature—opera and straight plays rarely do. In opera this has an interesting evolution. In the classical period, Mozart consistently ended operas on an upbeat note, even when the opera portrays a sexually predatory sociopath like Don Giovanni—Mozart tacks on an upbeat morale sung at the end so we can all act better and remember that creeps get their just desserts. In contrast, the romantic composers favored unambiguous tragedy, with 1800s opera littered with dead brides, murdered spouses, tubercular death, and lovers suffoc...

Art/Music Review Reich Richter Pärt Art by Gerhard Richter Music by Arvo Pärt and Steve Reich The Shed, Hudson Yards, Manhattan May 26, 2019 NYC’s newest performance venue is The Shed, part of the multi-gazillion dollar real estate Hudson Yards development, built over the Long Island Railroad tracks west of Penn Station. The development includes apartments priced for Russian oligarchs, a luxury mall, an oddly ugly huge sculpture, and this new performance venue, designed for maximum flexibility. It includes fixed art gallery space and cool movable architectural “tarp” that can either decoratively cover the permanent building (as in the first picture below), or roll leftwards on huge wheels to cover the adjacent plaza for various installations and performances.  For a cool animation of how this works, look at the sixth panel down at this website .  The development as a whole has been rightly panned by critics as yet another NYC extravagance for the ...

Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 By William Shakespeare Translated by Douglas Langworthy Play On! Festival/Oregon Shakespeare Company Classic Stage Company, Manhattan May 31 and June 1 2019 The current Play On! Festival is presenting all the works of William Shakespeare in roughly chronological order over one month, in a small theater in Greenwich Village. The unique aspect here is that each play has been “translated” by a writer, dramaturge, or actor. As described by Lue Morgan Douthit, literary director of the co-sponsoring Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the writers were first charged to “do no harm” and keep as much of the original text as possible. One thing the playwrights were not supposed to do was “fix” problematic or dated aspects of the plays, inject modern political commentary or spin, add or subtract characters, or adapt the story to new settings and situations. On the other hand, during the actual performances the director was told to get the plays down to 2 hours or so, n...