FEATURES
By Tim Smith and Tim Smith,sun music critic | November 13, 2006
It was a calculated act of kindness that changed the opera world. A prescient impresario thrust a libretto with a biblical plot into the hands of a reluctant and depressed Giuseppe Verdi, who was then thinking about never composing again after the exceptionally modest success of his first opera and humiliating flop of his second. Something about that unsolicited libretto caught Verdi's imagination and led to his first certified hit, Nabucco - and the birth of his genius. Nabucco 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, 8:15 p.m. Friday, 3 p.m. Sunday, Lyric Opera House, 140 W. Mount Royal Ave. Tickets $45-$127.
FEATURES
By Tim Smith and Tim Smith,SUN MUSIC CRITIC | March 28, 2005
The best opera about the sainted medieval peasant girl who saved France didn't make a sound. That would be Carl Dreyer's 1928 silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, which couldn't be more operatic in its theatrical weight or intensity of expression. Verdi and Tchaikovsky tried hard to give Joan the opera she deserved; both came up short. Tchaikovsky's The Maid of Orleans has suffered a particularly bad rap. Although an initial success in St. Petersburg in 1881, it sank quickly, considered by many to be a drama-dead libretto (the composer's own)
ENTERTAINMENT
By J. Wynn Rousuck | December 16, 2004
`Rent' returns Rent - Jonathan Larson's rock-music retelling of La Boheme - returns to Baltimore Monday for a one-week run at the Hippodrome Theatre. Winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award, the musical became the 10th longest-running show in Broadway history earlier this year. Larson's libretto moves the opera's story to New York's East Village, substitutes AIDS for tuberculosis and peoples the cast with a rock musician, video artist, street drummer, performance artist, etc. The touring production stars Tallia Brinson as Mimi, an exotic dancer; Dan Rosenbaum plays her love interest, Roger, a songwriter; and Andy Meeks is his roommate, Mark, a filmmaker.
ENTERTAINMENT
By Tim Smith and Tim Smith,SUN MUSIC CRITIC | July 10, 2003
Strange adventure! Maiden wedded to a groom she's never seen ... Groom about to be beheaded in an hour on Tower Green." That, in a nutshell, explains the setup of Gilbert and Sullivan's 11th collaboration out of a remarkable 14 operettas, The Yeomen of the Guard, which is being revived by the Young Victorian Theatre Company for its 33rd season over the next two weekends. The plot, however, only begins to explain this work and its attractions. G&S aficionados have always ranked Yeomen among the best of the lot, though it is the least typical, largely eschewing the musical and theatrical slapstick that spark H.M.S.
ENTERTAINMENT
By Tim Smith and By Tim Smith,Sun Music Critic | November 3, 2002
If you needed evidence to support the (now outre) maxim that behind every successful man is a woman, the case of Jetty Treffz and her husband, Johann Strauss the Younger, works very well. If it weren't for her, he might never have gotten serious about composing operettas. And for a delectable example of how a philandering husband can have a clever wife right behind him, plotting and executing the perfect revenge, you can't do much better than Strauss' greatest operetta -- the greatest Viennese operetta, period -- Die Fledermaus.
ENTERTAINMENT
By Tim Smith | April 14, 2002
Fans of the Robert Graves novel I, Claudius, so brilliantly dramatized for TV years ago, will have an automatic entry point into Opera Vivente's next production -- Handel's Agrippina. Fans of another fun old TV series, Dynasty, should have an even easier time. Composed around 1709, at the end of Handel's three-year stay in Italy, the opera caused something of a sensation when it was premiered in Venice. Both the plot and the music were just what the public there craved -- lots of humor and irony to spice up the tale of how Agrippina, wife of Claudius, connives to get her son Nero onto the throne of Rome, lots of florid arias and colorful orchestration to provide aural delight.