STAGES & SCREENS

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 ...

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 his later plays Tom Stoppard almost always included a character who turns from a life of frivolous tomfoolery, of one sort or another, coming face to face with evil in the world, and recognizing 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 ...

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 . I should note that since finishing the novels, I have found one other blogger who ranked Morrison’s early novels. But I still haven’t found anyone who has ranked them all. My rankings are strictly my personal preference. Here they are.       1. Beloved (1987). This is a somewhat boring choice, perhaps, as Beloved is widely considered Morrison’s masterpiece, and she spent a fair amount of time resisting any notion that th...