Category Archives: Opera
Flip-flopping at Spoleto, Italy
First there was talk of sharing an opera, now there’s none.
Dan Wakin, the classical music reporter for The New York Times, is in Italy covering the Festival of Two Worlds, the counterpart to Charleston’s Spoleto Festival USA. He writes that the two festivals are considering sharing an orchestra next year, at a cost that was […]
Belle of the ball
Rossini’s La Cenerentola is truly a Cinderella story. She was pushing against history, not running with it. That’s what it seemed like until we realized we were wrong. It’s indeed a progressive opera. The ash girl is looking to the future.
When it was announced that Amistad would be the marquee opera to be staged at […]
The spectacle of Monkey
I’ve talked to a lot of people who love Chen Shi-Zheng’s Journey to the West, his collaboration with Britpop composer and singer Damon Albarn and Gorillaz illustrator Jamie Hewlett. What’s perhaps a little surprising to those who love it is how many people are on the fence about it.
No one seems to doubt Monkey’s moment […]
Year of the Trickster?
At Thursday’s inauguration of the historic Memminger Auditium, I bumped into Thulani Davis, the librettist of Amistad. We talked about the opera’s Trickster God, a character inserted into the historical events of the slave ship mutiny in order to raise a tragedy of history to a tragedy of mythic and, therefore, operatic proportions. The source […]
Thoughts on Amistad
Lindsay Koob already handled the tough part of reviewing Amistad. So I won’t burden you with a exposition, analysis, and evaluation. I’ll offer instead a few thoughts. Take them for what they’re worth.
For me, Amistad gets a B-. It’s a good opera — rich, historical subject matter, a poetic libretto, ingenious music, clever and imaginative […]
Fashion history repeating itself
At left is the pianelle, or chopine. Fashionable ladies of 16th-century Venice wore these to keep their flowing gowns away from mud and other nasty things on the street (if you’ve been to Venice, you know what I mean). Renaissance women slipped their dancing shoes into the tops (you can see where the foot […]
The real Cindy, please stand up
Richard Zacks, in entertaining book An Underground Education, suggests that the story of Cinderella is derived from an ancient Egyptian story that itself is really about a foot fetish. The original German fairy tale supports that notion with its graphic description of what was then called a pianelle, or 18-inch-high cork-soled galosh that Renaissance women […]
A new date added to Monkey
A new date has been added to the roster of performances of Monkey: Journey to the West due to “popular demand,” according to a press release. That new date is Sun. June 1 at noon. For tickets, go to Spoleto’s website or call (843) 579-3100.
A guest review of Monkey
CofC theater professor Susan Kattwinkel sent us this review of last night’s Monkey.
The visuals, beyond what is provided by the constant movement and attention-grabbing activity of the performers, also provides a nice mix of east and west. Monkey is face-painted, very much like the Monkey King character in Beijing opera, while most others are merely […]
A germane celebrity spotting
Last night was the inauguration of the renovated Memminger Auditorium, the old gymnasium wrecked by Hurricane Hugo in 1989. It’s a historic building that hosted another kind of historic renovation: the restaging of Anthony Davis’ Amistad, a 1997 opera about a slave ship revolt in 1839 that set the stage for American civil liberty prior […]
