Stages & Screens

Fear and Self-Loathing in Proust and the Gay Canon

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Marcel Proust’s iconic character the Baron de Charlus, his narrator tells us, is fooling himself that no one knows he’s gay. Charlus throws verbal daggers at other men he suspects to be gay, effusively praises Balzac for writing about gay people, and carelessly remarks about the good looks of the man everyone knows him (but no one admits they know him) to be sleeping with. “When Monsieur de Charlus was not talking about his admiration for Morel’s good looks,” Proust’s narrator says, “as if they were nothing to do with a proclivity—known as vice—he held forth about this vice, but as though it had absolutely nothing to do with him. Occasionally he didn’t even hesitate to call it by its name.” This passage, from the new Oxford World Classics translation of Sodom and Gomorrah, which came out last week, is perhaps a case of the floral-patterned ceramic teacup calling the floral-patterned ceramic tea pot floral-patterned. Proust lived a remarkably “out” life as a homosexual for his time, from his school days on, and was wonderfully verbose about gay matters in his writings. However, he was not above writing a friend to ask them not to discuss his orientation, or adding to the same letter a sudden unusual, and rather transparent, postscript about having just spotted a ravishing blonde woman in a cafe. When the writer Andre Gide, the most prominent French advocate for homosexuality of their time, made a remark about Proust’s sexuality, Marcel tossed off a livid letter suggesting damning remarks could be made about Gide too if he could not hold his tongue. (Carter 117.) Proust is fooling no one about his now-famous orientation, and we love him for it. So why doesn’t he seem to love the Baron for it? Why, as has often been asked, did so brave a homosexual in writing about homosexuality go so far out of his way to make his otherwise very autobiographical narrator heterosexual? The same question is asked about his Judaism, as he was part-Jewish but made the hero of his novel Christian.

British television show "Number 10" got personal with Disraeli and Gladstone

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

William Ewart Gladstone ranked second, third or fourth on all five of the lists of the best prime ministers in UK history that are cataloged on Wikipedia, which includes lists compiled by The Times of London and four prominent historians. But as I noted in a blog post last year, Gladstone has never been the subject of a movie, unlike Winston Churchill, who ranks first on all of the lists, and Benjamin Disraeli, who ranks considerably lower. There is however one filmed representation of Gladstone, a fifty-minute episode of a 1983 ITV television series called “Number 10,” named for the home of the Prime Minister at Number 10 Downing Street. This month I managed to find a copy of an NTSC DVD of the series, which I’d struggled to find when I wrote that article. The show presents a character study of seven prime ministers that is unmatched by anything comparable on American television.

Is O'Neill Forgotten? And Six Other Ruminations on the Ever-Regenerating Genre of the Musical

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The hard part of having an aging legacy as a playwright is “being forgotten,” confesses Eugene O’Neill in the Goodman Theatre’s new musical Iceboy!, Or The Completely Untrue Story of How Eugene O’Neill Came to Write ‘The Iceman Cometh.’ The O’Neill character in the Goodman’s outlandish screwball comedy, played by TV’s Nick Offerman (“Parks and Recreation”), ought to know if he’s being forgotten. He begins each act with a survey of the audience: “How many of you have heard of me?” (The results are divided. The upper balcony has largely not heard of Eugene O’Neill; the main floor largely has.) “Boo yourselves if you’ve never heard of my play The Iceman Cometh.” (Lots of hearty boos.)

An Isolate from the People

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“It might seem harsh to say so, but the truth is that I am more and more convinced that as an all-round thinker, or, more properly, as a systematic thinker, Ibsen really doesn’t fit the bill. … But of course Ibsen is Ibsen, and I should be the last to complain that he is not Herbert Spencer.” - William Archer upon meeting Henrik Ibsen, as quoted in Henrik Ibsen: The Man & The Mask by Ivo De Figueiredo.

Don't Say Accessible: Opera Wars and the Fight Over What Opera Can Be

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Nine pages before the end of the new book Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for its Future, author Caitlin Vincent quotes a more than 40-time contemporary opera librettist about the stigma against accessibility in modern opera.

“Librettist Mark Campbell recalled being confronted by a composer collaborator after Campbell described his music as ‘accessible’ in a public forum. ‘He took me aside and said, Don’t ever use that word again. Critics will use that against me. And I said, I didn’t mean it was dumbed down. I meant the audience will connect with it.’”

Following the Great Migration, and a Month's Chicago Cultural Roundup

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Whether this music came from Alabama or Mississippi or other parts of the South doesn’t matter anymore. The men and women who make this music have learned it from the narrow crooked streets of East St. Louis, or the streets of [Chicago]’s Southside, and the Alabama or Mississippi roots have been strangled by the northern manners and customs of free men of definite and sincere worth, men for whom this music often lies at the forefront of their conscience and concerns. Thus they are laid open to be consumed by it; its warmth and redress, its braggadocio and roughly poignant comments, its vision and prayer, which would instruct and allow them to reconnect, to reassemble and gird up for the next battle in which they would be both victim and the ten thousand slain.”

Spring Cleaning: A Roundup of Chicago Theater Amid the Last Two Months of Winter

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

T.S. Eliot is known for his reservations about spring. Yet the author of the line “April is the cruelest month” wrote a friend in April 1911 to tell her about how beautiful the season was. “Paris has burst out, during my absence,” Eliot wrote, “and it is such a revelation that I feel I ought to make it known. At London, one pretended that it was spring, and tried to coax the spring, and talk of the beautiful weather; but one continued to hibernate amongst the bricks … But here!” Chicago has been more like Eliot’s London than his Paris recently, but spring is almost here, so it’s time to clean out my notebook of winter stage observations from the last seven weeks of Chicago theater. After a somewhat sparse fall season for Chicago theater, with few productions that I personally found exciting, the winter has been productive. These nine shows, ranging from opera to musical theater to straight plays to one Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, show a little of the breadth and depth of the Chicago arts scene. They are organized in reverse chronological order, with the one I saw most recently first.

Ranking All 13 Andrea Chénier Videos

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Some operas reward repeat listens, but relatively few reward back-to-back repeat watches. Many librettos boil their stories down to the essentials, with a love triangle at the center and little historical or imaginative detail going on around it in the words. And they can be long, with the longest operas running six hours. (Hi, Wagner.)

Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, however, is a rare counterexample. With a libretto by Luigi Illica (Tosca, La Bohème), the opera runs just two hours but gives a sweeping account of the cultural and political life during both the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. The experience is often more like watching a play than an opera, with an emphasis on dialogue that does not interrupt the sweep of the melodies but explores many details outside of the standard love triangle (which can be found here as well for those who love that). This packing of detail into a tight package might help explain why, in the last two years alone, at least three web sites have attempted to rank the many, many recordings of this opera: It’s fun to revisit, and one almost always catches something new in revisiting it. This is the third of those web posts. Unlike the other two, which focused on records, I am focusing on video versions as I find the opera immensely rewatchable.

The New York Times Misses Its Moment at the Met's Kavalier and Clay

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When the Metropolitan Opera chose to open its 2025-26 season with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, they must have felt it was a risky move. The brand-new, sweeping, three-hour adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Jewish comic book makers who invent a superhero to fight the Nazis in World War Two had only played at Indiana University, as the co-producing LA Opera had canceled what was to be its debut run due to financial constraints. The top brass decided not even to give it a slot in the “Met in HD” series, which broadcasts the operas in movie theaters around the world. So when The New York Times responded to its grand opening with the headline “A ‘Kavalier & Clay’ Opera Doesn’t Meet Its Moment,” it seemed like a potentially serious hit to the Met’s recent ambitious, financially perilous effort to introduce as many as six new operas each season. However, after that review the full multi-week run of the opera nearly sold out every night in the Met’s cavernous 3,800-seat auditorium, and now, after I was finally able to see the opera last night in my local movie theater, I can say it seems quite clear it’s the New York Times that missed its moment.

Tom Stoppard Grew from a Man of No Conviction: An Appreciation

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In his later plays Tom Stoppard almost always included a character who turns from a life of frivolous tomfoolery, of one sort or another, comes face to face with evil in the world, and recognizes his responsibility to become the change he wishes to see. That was in fact the trajectory of Stoppard’s writings themselves. He went from being a writer who avoided writing about politics — someone who said his favorite line in literature was “I’m a man of no convictions—at least, I think I am” — to being someone who wrote a nine-hour trilogy of plays on the origins of Russian socialism, and for whom almost every new play for two decades ended up carrying some kind of political theme. I loved this change in Stoppard as much as I’d loved what he’d written before the transformation. To hyperbolize as one does in the face of a loss, Stoppard’s writings were in a small way the spur for such an intellectual awakening in me as well. As young theater kids, my brother and I were interested in a wide variety of subjects—politics, history, literature, theater, film—but like a lot of humanities kids were not particularly awake to the joys of other subjects, like math and science. (It’s a cliché of journalists to say that the reason one chooses that field is to avoid math.) When we encountered Stoppard’s plays, particularly his best, Arcadia, we saw that our beloved art form could tell stories that heretofore it had not, finding literature in chaos theory, the “hard problem” of consciousness, mathematics, physics. He also made other subjects fascinating and entertaining in a way many have tried to imitate but none have equaled. His death over Thanksgiving weekend was as hard a blow for me as any celebrity death ever has been. To say he was my favorite playwright seems too tiny a tribute. He changed my relationship to the world. His personal evolution, his dramaturgy and my own intellectual maturation are versions of the same story.

Reading and Ranking All of Toni Morrison's Novels in 30 Days

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I was surprised when a Google search for a ranking of Toni Morrison’s novels came up empty. Only Forbes magazine advertised “The Greatest Toni Morrison Books, Ranked and In Order,” but it turned out this meant they had listed her books in chronological order. This seems a major gap for the Internet, so I read all 12 of her fiction books in less than 30 days and have compiled my own ranking. This diverges from the subject “Stages and Screens” but is a follow-up to my last post, on why more Morrison novels have not been adapted dramatically.

Why Aren't There More Toni Morrison Film Adaptations?

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The New York Times on March 11 of this year ran a story titled “Netflix is gobbling up world literature. What could go wrong?” The sub-headline read, “The streamer keeps mounting lavish adaptations of beloved novels – and making them all feel like just more Netflix.” That headline made me wonder: With that flood of novel adaptations underway, why hasn’t there been more than one film or TV adaptation of a novel by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison? She has been called “one of the greatest authors in American history,” and “one of the world’s most celebrated and controversial modern authors,” among many other plaudits. As a blogger about stage and screen who has also read every one of Morrison’s 12 novels, I can personally attest the novels are highly cinematic, well-suited to cinema. And since 2020, there has been a push for more dramatic works by African-American and minority authors. So what gives?

Is Eugene O'Neill's Reputation Getting Fragile?

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“In 1956, the year Long Day’s Journey into Night premiered, the reputation of America’s foremost dramatist was at an all-time low,” wrote scholar Ralph L. Corrigan Jr. in a paper on November 7, 1956. “Most critics were content to think of the dramatist as an outdated, over-the-hill, third-rate thinker who had been lucky to write a few decent plays.”

Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey changed all that. The playwright has enjoyed a seemingly invincible reputation almost ever since that period of waning popularity. But might such a moment ever be in danger of returning? When a star-studded production of O’Neill’s Anna Christie with Michelle Williams and Tom Sturridge opens at St. Ann’s Warehouse on November 28, it will be the first time since 2020 that a major Off-Broadway production of O’Neill’s has launched, and Broadway is currently in the longest drought for productions of plays by Eugene O’Neill in the more than 100 years since it started producing O’Neill. The Great White Way has not mounted an O’Neill play since Denzel Washington’s The Iceman Cometh closed in July of 2018, making it seven years and three months and counting. And there are apparently no plans to produce O’Neill in the next season either, based on the existing lists of upcoming shows. Such a drought isn’t totally unprecedented: Broadway took a six year-plus break from O’Neill between the day Desire Under the Elms closed in May of 2009 and Hughie opened in February of 2016. But it is highly unusual. To find another break that long one must go back to the 1940s, when O’Neill was alive. For most of the century, O’Neill has been staged every couple of years on Broadway.

Radvanovsky's Medea at the Lyric Opera Rehabilitates a True Anti-Hero

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In Madeline Miller’s novel Circe, the famous title witch has occasion to speak to her niece, Medea. Circe, who turns many of Odysseus’ men into pigs before he persuades her to change them back and she gets in bed with him, warns Medea that her husband Jason is waning in his feelings for her. Medea will not listen. “They will never take Jason from me,” Medea says in the novel. “I have my powers, and I will use them.” Circe, whom Miller turns from a villain to a feminist anti-hero by empathizing with her where males have not over centuries of representations, fears the worst will happen in Medea’s case. Miller can rehabilitate Circe, but she can’t quite rehabilitate Medea. The bloody conclusion of Medea’s story is well known to most people with a passing knowledge of Greek myth. She kills both of her children to get back at her ex-husband as he marries a new bride, kills that new bride and sets fire to the temple. A hard character to rehabilitate.

As Hollywood Flounders, Many Movie Theaters Fill Seats With Old Pictures

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

President Trump’s renewed promise today to execute a 100-percent tariff on film production outside the United States is a symptom of a desperate state of affairs in the film industry. The stream of grim headlines coming out of Hollywood this year shows why. “Production in Hollywood plunges to historic lows as nearly half of US projects move abroad,” read one headline in August from Senal News. The story reports that Hollywood production jobs are down by 92,000 from 2022. And it’s not just a question of local production. Box office receipts are suffering too. “The 2025 box office is off to a terrible start . Is the problem supply or demand?” read the LA Times on March 25. The story says the problem is supply. There are fewer movies in theaters, fewer movies being made, and fewer people attending the movies that are in theaters. But you wouldn’t know it from the crowds at screenings of classic films at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago. On August 14, I attended the third in a string of sold-out 70 mm screenings of a four-hour, 60-year-old sand marathon, David Lean’s masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia, in the large 750-seat main theater at the Music Box. It was a Tuesday night, and the film started at 6 p.m. and ended after 10 p.m. But the house was packed with viewers young and old and in-between. This was not an isolated incident. All over Chicagoland, movie theaters are quietly making bank screening old movies as new movie production in Hollywood sputters. Classic cinema screenings have become one of the industry’s few bright spots.

Welcome to the 100th Opera Season After the Art Form's Alleged Death

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A new opera season is upon us, one that in April will see the celebration of the 100th anniversary of what has been called “the death of opera.” On April 26, 1926, the great conductor Arturo Toscanini burst into tears upon completing the first performance of Puccini’s last opera Turandot. Since then, though many excellent new operas have been performed, it’s been argued that popular opera has died. The New York Times opera critic Zachary Woolfe in 2024 went so far as to say “A century on, it can be said confidently: With Puccini died the great opera tradition. There have been extraordinary works created since his death, but next to none have penetrated the public consciousness, or the core repertoire.” The century of music past “Nessun Dorma” (Turnadot’s greatest aria, which itself has been played almost to death) has been diverse and exciting, and there are more new operas than ever to get excited about in the last few years, with many different styles of classical music. However, if audiences feel something is missing in the listenability of the new operas compared with the old ones they are not entirely mistaken.

The Summer of the Dying Culture: Anna in the Tropics, Cabaret, The Leopard, and a Mini Midwest Theater Tour

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The best production I’ve seen in decades of going to the highly refreshing, nationally notable countryside American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin is running through late September. Nilo Cruz’s Anna in the Tropics is one of the most moving of a spate of works I’ve taken in recently about a dying culture facing change from without and within. Anna was one of three plays I saw on a sort of mini Midwest theater tour while on vacation this August, including that classic elegy to the 1930s Weimar Republic, Cabaret, at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Now that we seem to be witnessing a similar moment in our own time, in which half the country celebrates and the other half mourns sweeping changes in the power structure that alter the fabric of society as we know it, the theme is newly poignant.

The Two Noble Kinsmen by Shakespeare and Fletcher in Two Rare Productions

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

No sooner did I publish my last blog post declaring that Shakespeare completists have “perhaps no bigger challenge than finding a production of all three plays in Shakespeare’s early King Henry VI trilogy” than an even rarer Shakespeare play showed up in my neighborhood: The Two Noble Kinsmen, by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare. This weekend and next it is being produced in Forest Park, Illinois by the Forest Theatre Company. As I made clear in that prior article, Henry VI is rarest in the full three-part format; it is often edited into two parts when staged. But The Two Noble Kinsmen is another holy grail for fans of the Bard. In fact, an article in the Forest Park Reviewreported that one self-described “Shakespeare completist” emailed the production’s artistic director, Richard Corley, to say she is flying in from England just to see this small, free outdoor production because she hasn’t seen it yet. “I have not talked to a single person who’s seen it before,” Corley told the newspaper.

Shakespeare's Henry VI: The Best Video Versions for the Completist

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A little research on the Internet, particularly on Reddit and in The New York Times, shows there are many Shakespeare fans trying to see every one of his plays performed somewhere, somehow, by somebody. Such completists have perhaps no bigger challenge than finding a production of all three plays in Shakespeare’s early King Henry VI trilogy. The plays are rarely produced, very long, and usually when performed chopped into two plays instead of three. This makes seeing Shakespeare’s trilogy in any form close to his intention almost impossible. I saw the plays in two parts in New York City in 2018 performed by the National Asian American Theatre Company, a credible production. But I hankered to see it in a format that, however edited, retained some character of the playwright’s three-part vision and structure. The fact is, very few of Shakespeare’s fans around the world live in a city like New York and even there it isn’t performed often. So, for completists, the DVD market is essential.

Why Aren't There Any Movies Starring British Prime Minister William Gladstone?

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Why hasn’t William Gladstone, a towering figure in British politics who was prime minister four times in the 19th Century, been the central character of any film biopics? Why has he been the starring role in only one even remotely significant play, Hugh Ross Williamson’s short-lived 1937 show Mr. Gladstone, which never made it out of London? Why has his arch-rival in British politics, Benjamin Disraeli, been the subject of so many plays and films when by contrast he was only prime minister twice and usually ranks lower in the lists of the best prime ministers in Britain’s history?

Theater as Artistic Community Journalism: Eureka Day, Purpose, Dhaba on Devon

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The 2025 Tony Awards were particularly good for regional theater this year – and for plays by, for and about the community they are staged in, a phenomenon that is rare but of which we have a few exciting examples this year. Theater today is notoriously New York-centric. The Pulitzer Prize, for example, reportedly went 85 years before a play that had not yet played in New York was picked, from the first prize ever given for drama (to Why Marry? by Jesse Lynch Williams) in 1918 to 2003’s Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz, which was commissioned by and first performed at New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida (in the Miami area, not a city widely known for its theater). There have since been very few others, including Fat Ham by James Ijames, which won the Pulitzer while its first off-Broadway production (I saw it at the Public Theatre in New York) was still selling advance tickets. Thanks to the pandemic, it had only been staged in an online video production, by the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia. But even more rare is when theater functions as a kind of community journalism, in which the play is written by a local resident of the theater at which it is first staged, about that community, and staged first for that community. This has been a good year for that style of play.

Fellini Gets Another Look After Critics Knock Him Down Several Pegs

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This year the legendary film director Federico Fellini is getting his first box office test since his movies 8 ½ and La Dolce Vita plummeted in the famous 2022 Sight and Sound ranking of the best 250 films of all time, probably thanks to a reckoning on the treatment of women provoked by the “#MeToo” movement. Fellini’s most acclaimed film, 8 1/2, went from #7 in the 2012 poll to #31 in the 2022 ranking. La Dolce Vita, meanwhile, went from #36 to #60. Why Fellini’s standing dropped almost certainly has more to do with the controversies surrounding the “#MeToo” movement than it does with a new aesthetic appraisal of his work.

The Mind-Blowing Muny Shows Musicals Are Not Just for Geeks and Elites

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Anyone who has the impression that Broadway musicals are just for theater kids, gays or Manhattan elites with hundreds to spend on a single ticket should travel to the center of the country to check out the The Muny in St. Louis. It just won the Regional Theater Tony Award this month, and I attended for the first time on its opening night on Monday June 16, a day declared “Muny Day” by St. Louis’ mayor to celebrate its new national status and the opening of the new season. What I found was that this 107-year-old, 11,000-seat outdoor theater, the oldest and largest in the country, which gives away 1,500 of its tickets every single summer night – even Broadway is dark on Mondays, but not The Muny! – to fans devoted enough to spend the day picnicking in Forest Park to get in, is unlike anything else in the country and is a place where, you might say, everyone is a theater kid.

Opera Theatre of St. Louis Deserves More National Attention in Its 50th Year

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Opera Theatre of St. Louis, an underrated gem that gets – but deserves more – national attention, celebrated its 50th anniversary this month with four solid operas that outshine the offerings of larger opera companies in many ways. The Opera Theatre received advance features from The New York Times and the Associated Press for its world premiere this summer of This House, a Harlem-set tale of ghosts and gentrification from composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettists Lynn Nottage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and her daughter Ruby Aiyo Gerber. But the reviews this summer were mostly local, and I always end up wondering whether St. Louisans realize quite how special an asset this annual festival of four operas really is.

Ranking the Nearly 50 Tony-Winning Regional Theaters

Thu, 29 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have been to all but one of the regional theaters that have won the Tony award since it began awarding regional theaters annually in the 1970s. I have attempted a basically impossible task here, which is to rank all of them. It’s impossible because, first of all, all of them have won the award and are all (I can attest in all but one case) wonderful theaters. Secondly, no one can see all the shows produced by almost 50 theaters sprawled out across this giant country, so a ranking inevitably favors whatever random production one happens to see. Nonetheless, I have cobbled together a basis for ranking, a mix of personal preference (it’s just my opinion and someone else will and should have 50 very different rankings), a rating of the quality and originality of the programming over the years (with admittedly some theaters more closely followed then others over decades) and the theater buildings or settings, with special favor often granted to theaters with a unique mission unduplicated around the country. It is inevitable that I’ve been to some of these theaters many times, and others only once. This year’s winner, The Muny in St. Louis, is not on this list because I will be attending it this summer for the first time. Full disclosure: I am from Chicago, so I’m more familiar in some instances with the five Chicago theaters over a long term. Still, it is in a good faith effort to rank objectively that I pick as the number one regional theater…

An Aside on Cosi: The WSJ Quite Agrees With Me

Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I just found a review of the production from the Wall Street Journal that ran just after I wrote my review. It totally agrees with me, and with a poster who read my review on another web site and wrote to say she “loved” it. The Journal’s critic says the concept “is clever and apt-at first,” but that in act two Sharon “doesn’t come up with a satisfying resolution within the opera’s rich, if tricky, original framework. Instead, he jettisons a sizable chunk of the score and tacks on an abrupt new ending. It may be the logical conclusion of Mr. Sharon’s ideas about the intersection of technology and human mutability, but it isn’t ‘Cosi.’

Sharon’s Concept Cosi Brilliant and Then Disastrous

Mon, 19 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When the Detroit Free Press excoriated Yuval Sharon’s new AI-themed Cosi Fan Tutte at Detroit Opera, in which the women are robots designed by the men, it had it half-right. I was sold on the audacious concept in the first act, but the show went both south and overboard in the second.

What sold me on it were these lines in the opening scene of Lorenzo Da Ponte’s original libretto, which melded so well with the girls-are-robots concept that I forgave it all its excesses until midway into the second act:

Stages & Screens: An Introduction

Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Allow me to share a little bit about my engagement with culture that might help you find an interest in this blog:

Like a lot of writers about stages and screens, I’m something of a completist. I’ve visited all but one of the nearly 50 Tony-winning Regional Theaters around the country, seen all of Shakespeare’s plays in production on stage or screen, seen the full Century Cycle by August Wilson (and his one-man autobiographical show twice), seen and/or read almost all of the Pulitzer Prize winners in drama, seen nearly the full repertoire of operas as defined by the largest opera company in the world, the Metropolitan Opera, as well as many operas that aren’t in what might be called the canon, visited almost all of the major opera houses in the United States, visited almost all of the theaters in New York City, seen much of the 2010s supply of theater on and off-Broadway, seen all of the American Film Institute’s Top 100 American films, seen almost all of the Academy Awards’ choices for Best Picture since 1927, and seen much of the Sight & Sound Top 250 in its various iterations over recent decades.