STAGES & SCREENS

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. While most musicals make millions of dollars per week on Broadway, and are viewed as big commercial enterp...

The Opera Theatre of St. Louis, an underrated gem that gets -- but deserves more -- national attention, celebrated its 50 th 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. It was my second trip to the city to see the offerings there, having been drawn in 2023 by a new production of Treemonisha by Scott Joplin and two other operas. Most of the operas this year beat that year’s selections, which impressed at the time. The f...

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 ...

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.’ Worse, it feels like a total letdown." There is a paywall but here is the link:  https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/theater/cosi-fan-tutte-and-the-threepenny-opera-review-directors-disrupt-the-classics-aa5b302e

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: Don Alfonso:  "I'd only like to know  What kind of creatures  Are these beauties of yours, if they're flesh and blood and bone like us,  If they eat like us, and wear skirts,  If, in fact, they're goddesses or women..." In Sharon's opera these lines are spoken just after we've been told that Don Alfonso is the CEO of a robot company, and that the women are being designed by the men. When I read these lines to people who saw they opera, but who had miss...

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 Acade...