Susan Hall
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Recent Articles:
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Berlin Philharmonic Rocks Carnegie Hall Front Page
Kirill Petrenko Brings Fresh Ear to Music
By: - Nov 20th, 2024The Berlin Philharmonic completed a three-day visit to Carnegie Hall in New York. The world’s greatest orchestra and its greatest conductor, Kirill Petrenko, did not disappoint. The programming combined an anniversary (the 200th birthday of Anton Bruckner), with fresh visits to favorites like Anton Dvorak’s 7th Symphony and a Violin Concerto by the film composer Erich Korngold.
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David Lang's Little Match Girl Returns Front Page
Annual Holiday Event at the Crypt
By: - Nov 16th, 2024David Lang's Pulitzer Prize-winning Passion opera The Little Match Girl will be performed in its original form with four artists both singing and playing instruments at the Crypt in New York.
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Frederick Douglass Comes to Hudson Hall Front Page
Anthony Knight Jr. Combines Negro Spirituals with Douglass' Text
By: - Oct 25th, 2024Hudson Hall in the Hudson Hall Opera House will present No Cowards in Our Band, an intertwined stage piece that combines nine spirituals with the reciting of original text by Frederick Douglass. In this drama, an aging and contemplative Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). considers the social, economic, and political ramifications of slavery and the Civil War and their impact on the future of the United States.
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Henze's Prince of Homburg in Frankfurt Front Page
Important Composer Gets a Perfect Production
By: - Oct 22nd, 2024Contemporary composers scramble for relevant subject matter. Opera companies overlook repertoire which is excellent and seldom staged. As the 100th anniversary of Hans Werner Hene's birth approaches in 2026, his work, produced in timeless fashion, offers fresh opportunities. Frankfurt Oper shows the way.
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Primary Trust at La Jolla Playhouse Front Page
2024 Pulitzer Play by Eboni Smith
By: - Oct 07th, 2024The La Jolla Playhouse presented the West Coast premiere of playwright Eboni Smith’s Primary Trust, winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Thirty-eight-year-old Kenneth, played by Caleb Eberhardt, lives in Cranberry, NY, a small town a short ride from Rochester. Kenneth’s small town consists of the usual bowling alley, a few banks, a church, and a smattering of small family-owned businesses. His single mom died when he was ten which led to a life growing up in foster homes
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Almodovar's First English Film at Lincoln Center Front Page
Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore Enthrall
By: - Oct 05th, 2024Pedro Almodovar will receive the 2025 Chaplin Award at Lincoln Center next spring. Some say he cannot make a bad movie. Certainly the painterly frames of each scene in his new film,The Room Next Door, are worthy of inclusion in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum and MOMA. Is their purpose, in this film, to distance us in time from the subject of the film, euthanasia?
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Anora at Lincoln Center's New York Film Festival Front Page
Sean Baker's Film Won the Palme d'or at Cannes
By: - Oct 03rd, 2024Sean Baker, who wrote and directed Anora, a Main Slate film at the Film at Lincoln Center’s New York Film Festival, pleaded at Cannes where he won the Palme d’Or in the spring, for compassion and support for sex workers. He does not see his film as mainstream, but you may if you give it a try. It is moving, fun, surprising and, yes, sympathetic.
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Robert Downey Jr. at Lincoln Center Theater Front Page
Playwright Ayad Akhtar Tackles AI
By: - Oct 01st, 2024Robert Downey Jr.. is everything you could hope for and more in this New York stage debut as the title character in Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal. Downey started his career playing a dog in Pound directed by his father. Familiar to filmgoers, his physical presence on stage at the Lincoln Center Theater combines his casual warmth with an edge demanded by a role in which his character may well have precipitated a suicide.
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Opera Philadelphia Opens a New Season Front Page
Missy Mazzoli's New Opera Asks: Do You Hear a Hum
By: - Sep 22nd, 2024Opera Philadelphia is a company that has done everything right for the past decade and yet continues to struggle to reach an audience. On April 25 it was announced that Anthony Roth Costanzo, a Princeton-educated counter tenor who not only attracts audiences as a singing artist but also has successfully experimented with programming, would begin his term as general director and president on June 1. His first public act as head of the company was to offer tickets at $11 and then pay-what-you-want or can on top of that.
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Leah Hawkins Captivates at the Park Avenue Armory Front Page
Awards by the Richard Tucker Foundation
By: - Sep 16th, 2024Leah Hawkins performed in the Officers Room at the Park Avenue Armory. She mesmerizes for her moment as Strawberry Woman in Porgy and Bess. You perked up for her Masha in Queen of Spades. She has performed an off-stage prayer in Aida and graduates to the highly-anticipated title role of the opera in Arizona next spring. A singer who can stop a show in a minute in a 4,000 seat venue, filled the intimate Officers Room room to overflowing.
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Hell's Kitchen Musical on Broadway Front Page
Aiicia Keys Tells Her Story
By: - Sep 14th, 2024Alicia Key has created herself as “Ali” in the musical Hell’s Kitchen now playing on Broadway. Keys grew up in the Manhattan Plaza complex, a few blocks from Times Square. Built during one of New York’s deep downturns, the building was supposed to be an upper middle class apartment house. Discounted apartments did rent. It became one of New York’s most desirable residences for artists. It formed the artist Keys.
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Little Island Presents Marriage of FIgaro Front Page
Anthony Roth Costanzo is Gender Fluid
By: - Sep 07th, 2024The major event at New York’s Little Island this summer is an abbreviated version of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro with all seven roles sung by premier countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. It will be performed through September 22. Zack Winokur produces.
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WOW at Carnegie Hall Front Page
Youth Orchestras from Around the World
By: - Aug 10th, 2024The series of WOW (World Orchestra Week) concerts at Carnegie opened with Teddy Abrams, maestro of the Louisville Orchestra and winner of Musical America’s 2022 Conductor of the Year award. He conducted the NYO2 Orchestra.
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Derecho at the La Jolla PLayhouse Front Page
Timely Take on Identity
By: - Aug 10th, 2024Derecho is the latest work mounted by the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. A derecho is a widespread, long-lived wind storm associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms. The play, Derecho, follows two second-generation Latina half-sisters Eugenia and Mercedes, played by Ashley Alvarez and Caro Guzman, respectively.
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The Master and Margarita at the 86th Street Theater Front Page
Moscow Ambience Is Wonderful
By: - Aug 10th, 2024Alexei Burago has directed Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita at Theatre 86 in New York. Jean Claude Van Italie did this stage adaptation, which follows the novel closely.
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N/A by Mario Correa at Mitzi Newhouse Theater Front Page
Past, Present and Future of US poitics
By: - Aug 07th, 2024Mario Correa’s play N/A is thoroughly entertaining. The two-hander is at the Mitzi Newhouse in New York through September 1. Holland Taylor and Ana Villafane star. Diane Paulus directs.
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Film at Lincoln Center Presents Mexican Films Front Page
A Spectacle Every Day
By: - Jul 21st, 2024Film at Lincoln Center and the Locarno Film Festival present “Spectacle Every Day: Mexican Popular Cinema,” a retrospective of Mexican cinema from the 1940s through the 1960s, to be from July 26 through August 8. With new restorations of many works rarely screened or some never before seen theatrically in the United States, and standout performances from the biggest stars.
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Elevator Repair Service Creates a New Ulysses Front Page
Summerscape at Bard Presents Staged Novel
By: - Jul 15th, 2024Elevator Repair Service, an innovative theater producing group, presented a staged version of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the Luma Theater at the Fisher Center as part of Bard’s Summerscape 2024 whuich commissioned the work.
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Experiments in Opera at HERE Front Page
New York Gets Four Delicious Mini Operas
By: - Jul 05th, 2024The world premiere of “Five Ways to Die” took place at HERE in New York. If the subject is “death,” it must be an opera. Tosa jumps to her death from the walls of Castel Sant'Angelo. Aida and her lover die in an airless Egyptian tomb. La Traviata coughs herself to death in a Parisian garret. Defying death, all these women sing marvelously. We suspend disbelief, carried away by gorgeous tunes. Experiments in Opera, a successful and innovative company, takes a different approach.
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Ulysses Quartet in Greenwood Cemetery Front Page
Angel's Share Presents
By: - Jun 25th, 2024The Ulysses Quartet performed Beethoven’s final work, his string quartet in A minor, in the Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. The classical spirit of Leonard Bernstein, who is buried here atop Battle Hill, pervades the place. Programs are various and always tasteful. The setting enhances the experience
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La Jolla Playhouse Ballad of Johnny and June Front Page
Wonderful Cash Musical in San Diego
By: - Jun 17th, 2024The La Jolla Playhouse presents The Ballad of Johnny and June, a musical about the lives of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. Narrated by John Carter Cash, played by Von Hughes, the play begins with John trying to decide if he wants to get married. John Carter Cash was the only child of the union of Johnny and June. As John contemplates marriage, he tells the love story of his famous parents and their challenges with fame and addiction.
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Houston Symphony Performs Strauss' Salome Front Page
A Perfect Concert Evening
By: - Jun 13th, 2024The Houston Symphony presented Richard Strauss’ Salome. It was a perfect concert opera production. All the singers were not only off book, but costumed to perfection (or unveiled when that critical moment arrives).
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Dial M for Murder at the Alley Theatre Front Page
A Witty Thriller
By: - Jun 11th, 2024Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, in association with Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, is presenting Dial M for Murder as a warmup to their annual Summer Chills programming. Based on the original play by Frederick Knott that inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder, the current version has been updated by Jeffrey Hatcher.
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An American Soldier Perelman Performing Arts Center Front Page
Huang Ruo and David Henry Wang Join Forces Again
By: - May 30th, 2024An American Soldier, an opera by Huang Ruo and David Henry Wang, has been developing for a decade. The 2024 version is co-commissioned by PAC NYC and Boston Lyric Opera. Audiences at the new Perelman Performing Arts Center in lower Manhattan, are the beneficiaries of deep thought and a moving musical response to a seemingly uncomplicated subject: the wish of a young man, born in the USA of Asian immigrants, to be considered ‘American.’
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Here There Are Blueberries at NY Theatre Workshop Front Page
Co-produced with Tectonic Theater Project
By: - May 29th, 2024Over and over again, in the Pulitzer-nominated play Here There are Blueberries, now playing at the New York Theatre Workshop in co-production with Tectonic Theater Project, we see photos of the commandants of the Auschwitz facility where the final solution was executed. They are comfortable, laughing together, being rewarded for work well done (gassing people) and in lounge chairs at a spa retreat on the property in Poland.
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