Susan Hall
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Recent Articles:
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Mozart Celebrated in New York Front Page
Festival Fifty Years Young
By: - Jul 26th, 2016The Mostly Mozart Festival is fifty years young. To celebrate the occasion, Lincoln Center put on The Illuminated Heart at David Geffen Hall. Singers were the A list of opera. It was like degustation at Sur Mesure. Like the All Star game, you wondered if another operatic music event could be going on anywhere. Seems like everyone who was anyone was on stage.
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Leon Botstein Makes the Case for Mascagni Front Page
Iris Beautifully Sung at Bard Summer Festival
By: - Jul 25th, 2016Leon Botstein, music impresario of the first order, declared that if Mascagni’s opera Iris was good enough for Toscanini, it was good enough for him. Many of us feel that if it’s good enough for Botstein, it’s good enough for us. The music is gorgeous. Botstein hears Wagner. We heard Puccini. The descending fifth leap from Tosca started many a phrase. Yet it was Mascagni that preceded Puccini.
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Shakespeare Globe's Merchant of Venice Front Page
Jonathan Pryce a Complicated Shylock
By: - Jul 24th, 2016Man’s cruelty to man is central to this comedy. This production wraps the audience into its web with humor, shock and awe.
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Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme Front Page
French Production at Lincoln Center Festival
By: - Jul 21st, 2016Moiiere's gift for embedding comedy in character, and weaving the elements of musical theatre in a unified whole were on full display at the Gerald Lynch Theatre. We continue coverage of the annual Lincoln Center Festival.
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Reich Reverberates at Lincoln Center Front Page
Ensemble Signal and Jack Quartet Capture the Spirit
By: - Jul 20th, 2016In his 80th birthday year, Reich is being celebrated by Tilson Thomas in San Francisco and in a train station outside London in September. He is in New York now with multiple concerts as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. We are fortunate indeed for this native New Yorker.
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Drumming by Steve Reich Front Page
So Percussion at Lincoln Center
By: - Jul 17th, 2016Bathed in blue light, the stage could be anywhere, in the heart of Africa or New York CIty. Steve Reich, one of the titans of modern music, captured mainstream attention with Drumming. Now everyone loves the iconic piece. Lincoln Center offers it and other works of Reich in their summer festival.
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Kanze Noh's Inaugural at Lincoln Center Front Page
Traditional Japanese Theater Intrigues
By: - Jul 16th, 2016Even if you don't know the conventions of Noh Theater, developed over 600 years in Japan, there is great pleasure in its performance. The Kanze Noh troupe sports players whose descent can be traced back 22 generations. Deep emotions are generated by performances of dramas from this rich history.
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Qian Yi Transforming in Paradise Interrupted Front Page
Lincoln Center Festival Opens
By: - Jul 14th, 2016Composer Huang Ruo talks about dimensionalism. You don't have to understand what the term means to get totally caught up in new dimensions in his opera Paradise Interrupted which opens the Lincoln Center Festival. Ruo's music, and Jennifer Ma's libretto based on the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden are enmeshed in The Peony Pavilion, a truncated version of the 16th century Chinese Opera. The original lasted 22 hours and has been performed by Qian Yi, a force of nature who weaves the song of the central character in the new opera.
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The Paper Hat Game at 3-Legged Dog Front Page
Torry Bend Blends Media with a Punch
By: - Jul 08th, 2016Scale is an important factor in how we respond to objects, art and theatre. Using the small frame of a puppet theatre, Torry Bend tells the story of a man who distributes paper hats on the Chicago Transit system. We could be anywhere in this intriguing take on urban life.
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New York Theatre Workshop's Hadestown Front Page
To Hell and Highwater with Anaïs Mitchell
By: - Jul 02nd, 2016A brilliant new take on the Orpheus myth by Anaïs Mitchell and Rachel Chavkin. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice was the basis of the first opera written in 1600. It has intrigued artists ever since, from Monteverdi to Christoph Willibald Gluck to Jacques Offenbach. Dramatists too have found the tale impossible to resist, Thomas Pynchon, Salmon Rushie and Tennessee William among them. This may be the first time the audience sits in purgatory.
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New York City Opera's Boffo Return Front Page
Catán's Florencia Brilliantly Produced
By: - Jun 27th, 2016Florencia en el Amazonas is exactly the kind of opera and production New York City Opera should mount. Now producing in a suitably-sized house, the revived opera company has mounted a wonderfully satisfying opera.
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Bounce, the Basketball Opera Front Page
Live Basketball, Live Singers, Infectious Drama
By: - Jun 26th, 2016Artists committed to the continuing attraction of opera as a form that draws an audience are experimenting. A workshop of Bounce, an opera conceived by Grete Holby and her Ardea Arts in conjunction with the University of Kentucky, is performed in a park in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. With dribbles as drumming and heros like Flight and Future, the future of opera itself is secured.
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O'Neill at the Metropolitan Playhouse Front Page
Alex Roe Directs the Playwright's First Stammers
By: - Jun 25th, 2016The Metropolitan Playhouse is producing two early Eugene O’Neill plays as part of their season on the topic of Hope. A satisfying evening of theatre makes a trip to the East Village a must for theatre buffs.
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4000 Miles at Magic Carpet Showroom Front Page
Amy Herzog's Intriguing Play in Denver
By: - Jun 13th, 2016Every nook and cranny of Denver is packed with terrific theatre. Cherry Creek Theatre makes a carpet showroom its home. Here we get to know Leo and Grandma in Amy Herzog's justly celebrated play, 4000 Miles.
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Sweet and Lucky by Zach Morris Front Page
Denver Gives a New Audience Experience
By: - Jun 12th, 2016How can theater reach out to new, young audiences? Brooklyn's Third Rail and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts have come up with one answer: Keep the audience standing and walking. Let the audiences move through a 14,000 square foot set. Keep the audience guessing where they are and what they are looking at. Disorient, move, provoke, satisfy.
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White Man on a Bus by Bruce Graham Front Page
Curious Theatre in Denver Produces
By: - Jun 12th, 2016Curious Theatre in Denver is committed to plays which pack a powerful punch. White Man on a Bus is a knockout, describing the current state of race relations in the US. It is also very good theatre.
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Hershey Felder Gives Us Irving Berlin Front Page
Felder a Masterful Man for All Seasons
By: - Jun 08th, 2016Hershey Felder has made a career of creating the great musicians of the past three centuries. His Irving Berlin is touching, witty and very American.
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Alan Gilbert Untempered at the Met Museum Front Page
Pekka Kuusisto and Alan Gilbert Groove on Ligeti
By: - Jun 05th, 2016Pekka Kuusisto took on the challenging Ligeti violin concerto with gusto, humor, and a quiet modesty. This was an unusual, and unusually effective combination of qualities, especially in view of the pick he took to the violin to make it into a guitar, and his beautiful whistling. David Fulmer conducted like a poet of music. John Zorn in the audience appreciated the performance of his work by the Mivos Quartet. It was another brilliant program put on by Alan Gilbert, who credits cellist Jay Chambers with suggesting Ligeti and his influence.
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Gerald Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest Front Page
Opera at Lincoln Center's Great Performers
By: - Jun 04th, 2016It's observed that great operas are often based on weak plays. Not so the new opera by Gerald Barry. While Barry cut about two-thirds of Oscar Wilde's perfect play, the spirit remains. The result is more like composers taking up Beaumarchais than Johm Luther Long..
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Yannick Nézet-Séguin Appointed by Met Opera Front Page
Questions Remain about Gelb's Control
By: - Jun 02nd, 2016Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra where he will continue, assumes the role at the Met Opera in the 2020-21 season. He is a wonderful conductor of opera. What remains to be seen is Peter Gelb's role as "artistic director" of the opera company. Many first-rate conductors have not accepted the role because Gelb has insisted on control. The Board may not allow Gelb to continue to assert himself in artistic matters.
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Marsalis Marches and Gilbert Honors with Brahms Front Page
A Dirge for Kurt Mazur
By: - May 31st, 2016The annual New York Philharmonic concert at St. John the Divine in New York was started a quarter century ago just as Kurt Mazur took the helm of the orchestra. The conductor was honored today in a wonderful New Orleans Funeral March led down the long aisle of the Cathedral by Wynton Marsalis and also a performance of Brahms' Second Symphony led by Alan Gilbert.
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Robertson Leads Majestic NYPHil Front Page
Alan Baer, Tuba, Superb in John Wiliams
By: - May 29th, 2016Music of all genres and spirits is overflowing the halls of David Geffen Hall and embracing the citizens of New York. Gustav Holst's The Planets brought amateur astronomers to Lincoln Center's Plaza for a viewing of Jupiter and its moons after we had heard the composer's interpretation. Wow!
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The Met Orchestra at Carnegie Front Page
Christine Goerke Is the Go-To Soprano
By: - May 26th, 2016James Levine is gloriously winding down his tenure as Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera. The man who brought us the full Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera may have aged, but he is blossoming still and the stage of Carnegie Hall is the perfect venue to display his monumental talents.
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John Douglas Thompson and Maggie Lacey Front Page
NY's TFNA Presents Ibsen and Strindberg
By: - May 25th, 2016Can men and women find themselves and satisfaction at the same time? This question has been asked since the beginning to time. Theatre for a New Audience, in their remarkable home, the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, features John Douglas Thompson and Maggie Lacey in Ibsen's A Doll's House and Strindberg's The Father, running in repertory.
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Weiner the Film Front Page
Entertaining Film Doesn't Reveal
By: - May 23rd, 2016Anthony Weiner may have revealed all on Twitter, but the film about his attempted political comeback as he ran for Mayor of New York in 2013 does not. It is an entertaining film. Weiner is more self-aware than many politicians, but the fact that he thinks he can behave in a style that forced his resignation from Congress apparently did not stop him from continuing that behavior. Politicians are like teenagers. You can warn them, but even after Gary Hart, they think: I am not vulnerable.
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