Susan Hall
Bio:
Recent Articles:
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for colored girls who have considered suicide Front Page
Ntozake's Classic Lives at the Booth Theater
By: - May 19th, 2022"for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf " is having a brilliant re-incarnation. The stage is lit only by the abstract chiaroscuro photos projected on soft screen, like the hazy landscape. A quiet light reveals Lady In Brown (Tendayi Kuumba) as this rhythmic dance poem begins. “Dark phases of womanhood , of never having been a girl..” Her movements are as powerful and sensuous as the words, with a spiritual nod to African roots.
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Phil Kline Coming to MASS MoCA Front Page
Bang on a Can Member is a Musical Omnivorei
By: - May 17th, 2022Bang on a Can and MASS MoCA present LOUD Weekend, a fully loaded eclectic super-mix of minimal, experimental, and electronic music over three days throughout the museum’s expansive campus. Phil Kline will be featured. With Jim Jarmsuch he will be improvising on loud guitar,
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Victoria Bond's Gulliver Travels to New York Front Page
Doug Fitch Discusses His Sets
By: - May 12th, 2022On May 13, Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival and Mostly Modern Projects co-present staged scenes from Victoria Bond's puppet operetta How Gulliver Returned Home in a Manner that was Very Not Direct. The production features puppets created by Doug Fitch, the renowned visual artist, designer and director, and libretto by Stephen Greco, prize-winning screen-writer and novelist, complementing the music by Victoria Bond. Fitch also directs the production.
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The English Concert at Carnegie Hall Front Page
Harry Bicket Delights with Handel
By: - May 11th, 2022Long before Richard Powers wrote the mega bestseller "Overstory" celebrating man’s relationship with trees, Handel wrote one of the most beautiful arias in the history of song. The cruel King Serse (Xerxes in Plutarch) opens the opera named for him with an aria celebrating a tree’s understory, its shade. Emily D’Angelo, a glorious mezzo who has graduated from Cinderella’s Prince to a role as King this season, was masterful in her presentation of this love song to a tree. To be sure, it’s a bit weird. So too the tangled love relationships in this opera.
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The Orchestra Now at Carnegie Hall Front Page
Adventures in Music
By: - May 10th, 2022The T?N orchestra will perform an adventuresome program twice in New York, this week and next. They will feature the works of William Grant Still, Carlos Chávez, Witold Lutoslaski and Karl Amadeus Hartmann.
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Igor Levit and the NYPhil at Carnegie Hall Front Page
Brahms and Bartok Dramas Unfold
By: - May 08th, 2022The New York Philharmonic returned to Carnegie Hall, its home until 1962, for a splendid concert. Both works performed reference death. Brahms had been close to Robert Schumann, who died during the composition of the composer’s 1st piano concerto. Bartok himself was deathly ill when he wrote the Concerto for Orchestra at a Saranac Lake health resort.
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Come to the Berkshires This Summer! Front Page
New Amtrak Trains
By: - May 08th, 2022Amtrak just launched a new seasonal service that will make it easier to enjoy the quaint towns and majestic views of Massachusetts' Berkshires. The new route, called the Berkshire Flyer, will shuttle passengers between New York City and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, beginning July 8 and operate on weekends throughout the summer.
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Alice Childress at Theatre for a New Audience Front Page
Brilliant Production Highlights a Formidable Playwright
By: - May 06th, 2022Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) brings us Alice Childress’ 1962 play, Wedding Band. It is set in a South Carolina backyard and the bedroom of Julia Augustine, a Black seamstress who is loud and proud with her neighbors, and a soft and loving companion to a German baker, Herman. He is white. They are celebrating their tenth anniversary of not-being-married,. Miscegenation is banned by law.
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American Buffalo by David Mamet Front Page
Nick Pepe Makes the Play Live
By: - May 04th, 2022American Buffalo, David Mamet’s great play, is running on Broadway now with a stellar cast. Lawrence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss give us Donny, Teach and Bobby, pacing the thrust stage chock full of junk like pieces of junk themselves. Bobby is a junkie. All three men have a false belief that they can alter the downward trajectory of their lives.
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Two Synge One Acts at Irish Rep Front Page
Charlotte Moore Captures the Playwright's Spirit
By: - May 02nd, 2022Charlotte Moore must have the same feeling for the Irish and their language that the playwright John Milington Synge did. In the W. Scott McLucas Studio Theater, a small venue located underneath the main house at the Irish Repertory Theatre, the people of Ireland are brought startlingly, truly to life. Two Synge One Acts abut each other. As audience in this theater, you are so close that you feel a part of the action, the language invades and elevates you. It is a thrilling experience.
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BSO's Andris Nelsons to Munich Philharmonic Front Page
New Orchestra Replaces BSO
By: - Apr 29th, 2022The Munich Philharmonic Orchestra will take over two more concerts at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg on May 20 and 21. The orchestra is filling in for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which had to cancel its entire European tour for this spring due to a major corona outbreak among the musicians*. The Munich Philharmonic is looking forward to these two concerts with Andris Nelson.
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Philip Glass Premiere at The Crypt Front Page
Wendy Sutter Performs on Cello
By: - Apr 26th, 2022The suite drew praise from audiences and critics world-widewide and was voted best new CD of the year by listeners of National Public Radio. The Crypt Sessions return with the world premiere of Philip Glass’ Songs and Poems II written for – and performed by – the magnificent Wendy Sutter, whom the Wall St. Journal casually hailed as “one of the great leading cellists of the classical stage.”
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Confederates by Dominique Morisseau Front Page
Signature Theatre Produces Premiere
By: - Apr 26th, 2022Dominique Morisseau has taken a loaded topic, the Big Mamma of black plantation culture, and fixed her in a space during the Civil War mashed up with the present. Big Mamma is bursting out of her role in the 1860s, getting the notion that with gun in hand and books to be read she can be free. In the present, she is a university professor, nurturing a young black student, a white student and a black female assistant anxious for tenure. Tyler Perry and Martin Lawrence have made fun of Big Mamma. The strength of Tennessee Williams’ white Big Mamma in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, comes from the springboard of this icon of plantation life.
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IATI Theater Presents Bloom Front Page
By Marco Antonio Rodriguez
By: - Apr 19th, 2022The story is placed in “the not so distant future”, a dystopian exposition of the legal persecution of people with non-binary sexual and gender orientation. Julia is completely rejecting of her son's sexual reality. Roan has been taken away by the authorities, imprisoned and tortured. We learn that neighbors, family members and 'friends' have been responsible for turning him in. It is only a matter of hours before he will be picked up and returned to prison.
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Jeremy Gill's Motherwhere Premiers in New York Front Page
Parker Quartet and New York Classical Players Shine
By: - Apr 15th, 2022Jeremy Gill’s Motherwhere premiered with the two stellar ensembles, the Parker Quartet and the New York Classical Player, performing. The evening began with Tchaikovsky's Andante Cantabile from his first string quartet. Madeline Fayette performed the movement exquisitely. She is known for her phrasing and the beauty of her tones. Gill's new rod followed.
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BAM Presents Jamie Lloyd and Martin Crimp Front Page
James McAvoy, a New Cyrano
By: - Apr 14th, 2022In the beginning was the word, said John in the Bible. This was also said about Cyrano de Bergerac. Jamie Lloyd and James McAvoy follow up with a version of Edmund Rostand’s play which celebrates the word as it is spoken today. No longer does it depend on a continuously mellifluous voice.
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Gong Lum's Legacy at New Federal Theatre Front Page
Elizabeth Van Dyke Directs World Premiere by Charles L. White
By: - Apr 11th, 2022Gong Lum's Legacy is presented by Woodie King Jr.'s New Federal Theater in association with The Peccadillo Theater Company. Written by Charles L. White. Directed by Elizabeth Van Dyke. The world is still Jim Crow's. We can peek into to the the lives of those oppressed by the system, both the African Americans and the newly arrived Chinese immigrants.
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Simon Dinnerstein at the Miller Theatre Front Page
Goldberg Variations on a Brand New Yamaha Piano
By: - Apr 04th, 2022Simon Dinnerstein performed Bach's Goldberg Variations at the Miller Theatre. She is a magician at the keyboard, giving us all the spiritual richness of the work along with great joy.
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Michel Van Der Aa at Park Avenue Armory Front Page
Upload with Julia Bullock and Roderick Williams
By: - Apr 01st, 2022Michel Van der Aa's music theatre works. This is a miracle, because he deploys many instruments, not only a libretto, often based on wild imaginings, yet sensibly based on a very simple story. In Upload, we are in the revere of the last act of Walkerie. Now a father is defying his daughter, not the reverse. The Park Avenue Armory mounts a compelling case fot his work
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Duke Ellington at Carnegie Hall Front Page
American Symphony Orchestra Embraces the Lion
By: - Mar 31st, 2022Leave it to Leon Botstein, America’s great educator, to bring Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige to Carnegie Hall, where is premiered in 1943 as a fundraiser for the Russian war effort, (The world turns.) Eleanor Roosevelt, Marion Anderson and Langston Hughes were in attendance that evening. Now Botstein conducting is cool. He often listens and taps his foot, slightly swaying to the improvisatory sections of works performed
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Kevin Puts Discusses His New Opera Front Page
The Hours Premieres at the Metropolitan Opera in the Fall
By: - Mar 28th, 2022The Hours is the highly anticipated new work by Kevin Puts. Renee Fleming, Kelli O'Hara, and Joyce Di Donato will star.
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Michel Van Der Aa at the Park Avenue Armory Front Page
Upload with Julia Bullock and Roderick Williams
By: - Mar 28th, 2022Michel Van der Aa's music theatre works. This is a miracle, because he deploys many instruments, not only a libretto, often based on wild imaginings, yet sensibly based on a very simple story. In Upload, we are in the revere of the last act of Walkerie. Now a father is defying his daughter, not the reverse. The Park Avenue Armory mounts a compelling case fot his work.
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Composer Jeremy Gill and the Parker Quartet Front Page
Premiere of a Kaleidoscope of Fairy Tales
By: - Mar 28th, 2022“Motherwhere” continues Jeremy Gill’s ongoing collaboration with the award-winning Parker Quartet, and is his first work for New York Classical Players. It premieres in New York on April 1. The author of the book that inspired the work, Zsófia Bán, is arriving from Hungary for the performance.
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Little Girl Blue by Laiona Michelle Front Page
Nina Simone Lives Again in New York
By: - Mar 27th, 2022Laiona Michelle inhabits and projects the great American soul singer, social activist and classical pianist Nina Simone in a compelling stage show. Designed as two of the evenings Nina Simone actually created, mixing storytelling and moving melodies, Michelle brings the Little Girl Blue to life.
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Repertorio Resident Director Leyma Lopez Front Page
Feminism in Classic Works
By: - Mar 21st, 2022Leyma Lopez discusses her work with Berkshire Fine Arts
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