Posts Tagged ‘regie’
Thursday, March 14th, 2013
With one of my favorite opera productions returning to the Met tonight, I’ve been considering lately what makes Willy Decker’s Traviata so fine, so satisfying, and so worth a return visit.
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Tags: peter gelb, regie, the eternal now, the met, traviata, willy decker
Posted in Rough and Regie | Comments Off on Then is now
Friday, December 9th, 2011
By James Jorden After putting off for a week trying to make some sense of the horrific mess that is the Met’s new Faust, I’m finally just going to give up. There are some disasters that bear writing about as what you might call teaching opportunities: this season’s Don Giovanni, for example, as a cautionary […]
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Tags: english national opera, gesamtkunstwerk, houston grand opera, peter gelb, regie, robert lepage, the machine, the met, willy decker
Posted in Rough and Regie | Comments Off on What went wrong?
Friday, November 18th, 2011
By James Jorden Now that it has become apparent that Robert Lepage’s production of the Ring at the Met is a fiasco (too soon? Nah.)… well, anyway, since arguably the production is a dreary, unworkable, overpriced mess whose primary (perhaps only) virtue is that it actually hasn’t killed anyone yet, and since, let’s face it, […]
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Tags: ann ziff, benedikt von peter, blogs, blu-ray, bryn terfel, Deborah Voigt, deconstruction, eva-maria westbroek, fabio luisi, gesamtkunstwerk, gwyneth jones, hd, james levine, jonas kaufmann, julian crouch, lady gaga, lehman's syndrome, martin kusej, metropolitan opera, otto schenk, peter gelb, phelim mcdermott, pundits, regie, richard croft, robert lepage, satyagraha, stefan herheim, the enchanted island, the fortress of solitude, the machine, the met, wagner
Posted in Rough and Regie | Comments Off on Ring Recycle
Saturday, October 8th, 2011
By James Jorden The Metropolitan Opera debut of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, an amazing 180 years into the work’s history, won mostly respectful reviews last week—in between snipes at Anna Netrebko’s momentary breaking of character during the “Tower Scene.” A common thread in both published and popular opinion, though, was that the piece itself was not […]
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Tags: anna netrebko, atys, black and white, Black Swan, carnegie hall, david mcvicar, donizetti, franco zeffirelli, glamour, john dexter, josef svoboda, joseph volpe, la traviata, lincoln center, live performance, metropolitan opera, new york observer, period costume, regie, repertoire
Posted in Rough and Regie | Comments Off on The Unglamorous Life
Thursday, May 19th, 2011
By James Jorden The critics’ reaction to Robert Lepage’s new production of Die Walküre at the Met leaves this contrarian reviewer in something of a quandary. Not only was pretty much everybody underwhelmed, but there was a consensus about what (they thought) was wrong: the clunkiness of The Machine, the lack of poetry in the […]
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Tags: bryn terfel, Deborah Voigt, frammistans, hd, regie, robert lepage, the machine, the met, wagner
Posted in Rough and Regie | Comments Off on Horse play
Thursday, April 28th, 2011
It’s fortunate that Lulu at Den Norske Opera was the last stop on the “Regietournee,” because honestly anything after that would have amounted to an anticlimax. If there is a more brilliant director working in opera today than Stefan Herheim, well, maybe I shouldn’t see any of his work, because it might be too much […]
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Tags: alban berg, clowns, deconstruction, gesamtkunstwerk, lighting, lulu, metropolitan opera, realism, regie, stefan herheim, symbols, tennessee williams, the met, tone rows, vienna school, wooster group
Posted in Rough and Regie | Comments Off on She sees dead people
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011
By James Jorden The Staatsoper Stuttgart may be called the cradle of Regietheater, or at least a cradle of Regietheater. Strong theatrical values have characterized this company from the opening of the theater in 1912 (the world premiere of Ariadne auf Naxos, helmed by megaregisseur Max Reinhardt) through the 1950s, when Wieland Wagner’s frequent projects […]
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Tags: calixto bieito, gesamtkunstwerk, journey of a thousand miles, leather trench coats, parsifal, realism, regie, revivals, richard wagner, staatsoper stuttgart, symbols
Posted in Rough and Regie | Comments Off on Regie in its natural habitat
Saturday, April 9th, 2011
By James Jorden I apologize for long period (two months!) of radio silence: it’s been a very busy spring season in New York, broken up by a two week vacation my traveling companion and I called the “Regietournee,” a sampling of some of the opera direction going on in Germany (and other northern European theaters.) […]
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Tags: barrie kosky, calixto bieito, doris doerrie, eurotrash, komische oper, otto schenk, regie, revivals, staatsoper unter den linden, symbols, the met
Posted in Rough and Regie | Comments Off on Berlin Diary
Friday, February 18th, 2011
By James Jorden I’m not the type to say “my head is still reeling,” but, go figure, my head is still reeling from seeing Vieux Carré performed by the Wooster Group last night. I’m not going to pretend to review this masterpiece (what could I say besides “oh, my God!” over and over again), but […]
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Tags: regie, tennessee williams, wooster group
Posted in Rough and Regie | Comments Off on Fair and square
Friday, January 14th, 2011
By James Jorden Garson Kanin wrote this novel a clef called Smash, a tale of a ruggedly handsome director’s trials in getting ready for Broadway a musical based on the life of a legendary vaudeville star, featuring a difficult young diva in the leading role—well, as you can see, the clef is pretty much a […]
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Tags: barbra streisand, garson kanin, karita mattila, lighting, luc bondy, montserrat caballe, regie, the met
Posted in Rough and Regie | Comments Off on The better is the enemy of the good