Feed

Zachary Woolfe

By Zachary Woolfe 3/27 4:22pm

Opera

(Courtesy City Opera)

School for Lovers: Christopher Alden Delivers Another Gift at City Opera With Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte

The role of the “other” opera companies in New York is to serve as alternatives to the Metropolitan Opera. It’s that simple.

It has been this way since the turn of the 20th century, when Oscar Hammerstein’s upstart Manhattan Opera House countered the Met’s stagnant repertory with contemporary opera and the American premieres of works like Pelleas et Melisande, Elektra and Salome. New York City Opera, in its prime, offered a similar package: the operas, directors and young, attractive singers that the Met wouldn’t touch.

Fast-forward a few decades, and the situation has reversed. The Met is now its own alternative, with an established and growing commitment to contemporary work and a variety of directorial approaches on display. No longer, at least in theory, is it all Zeffirelli-style naturalism, all the time. Read More

By Zachary Woolfe 3/20 11:25am

Trouble in TahitiLeonard Bernstein

The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. (Photo by Larry Fink)

A Lot of Trouble for Trouble in Tahiti, and It Was Worth It: The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra Works Wonders With Bernstein’s Opera

“We really don’t want to be jerks,” Jamie Bernstein told The Observer recently. “Who wants to be a jerk?”

Ms. Bernstein was sitting at the dining room table of her Chelsea apartment, talking about the legacy of her father, Leonard Bernstein. It’s that legacy that she doesn’t want to be a jerk about.

Along with her sister and brother and the small staff and board of the Leonard Bernstein Office Inc., Ms. Bernstein is in charge of overseeing the future of Lenny. This intimate group is the gatekeeper for all things Bernstein, giving the final approval for new productions, adaptations and arrangements. Read More

By Zachary Woolfe 2/14 5:10pm

theater

Keith Connolly, Bobby McElver (top), Brian Mendes (middle), Andrew Schneider (bottom), Ari Fliakos. (Photo by Michael Schmelling)

Wooster Group, in the Raw: For a Production of Early O’Neill, Gone Are the Usual New Media and Fancy Effects

“This isn’t what we normally do, take a play and simply stage it,” Ari Fliakos said over the phone recently.

Mr. Fliakos is an actor and a company member of the Wooster Group, which since its founding in the late 1970s has become one of the most influential theater ensembles in the world. No one would accuse the group and its director, Elizabeth LeCompte, of staging anything simply. Since long before the Internet era, their shows have conveyed a complex, fractured, frightening, seductive sense of information overload. Read More

By Zachary Woolfe 2/01 5:47pm

Opera

Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde and Jay Hunter Morris as Siegfried in Wagner's “Götterdämmerung.” Photo by Ken Howard. Courtesy Metropolitan Opera

Dead Ringer: Robert Lepage’s Götterdämmerung Leaves Something To Be Desired, Echoes Zeffirelli Spectacles

I hope it will spoil no one’s six-hour evening to learn that Robert Lepage’s production of Götterdämmerung, the fourth and final opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle, ends the way Mr. Lepage’s cycle began.

Although it was only September, 2010, it seems a long time ago that the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010-11 season opened with Das Rheingold, Read More

By Zachary Woolfe 11/29/11 6:35pm

Opera

TKTKTK

You Can Teach an Old Opera New Tricks… But Is It Really Necessary?

It can be valuable to go to the opera in the same way that most people do: not to the opening night of a new production with the donors and critics, but to the third or fourth or fifth production of a revival. Nerves have settled; singers are used to their parts and to one another. There is still the tantalizing uncertainty that’s a part of any live performance, but you can be more confident that you’re getting a finished product. It’s on nights like these that you can get a real sense of an opera company. Read More

By Zachary Woolfe 11/01/11 5:22pm

Opera

Basinski, 1994.

Williamsburg’s Arcadian Past: Composer Billy Basinski Stars in Robert Wilson’s Quasi-Opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic

On a cold, drizzly morning last week, artist and journalist Ethan Pettit was standing in front of a big steel door in a stairwell in a nondescript loft building on North 11th Street. Mr. Pettit is a genial, hulking guy with broad, friendly features. Even with his curly, shoulder-length hair, matted down by the rain, he didn’t seem like a likely candidate for drag. But in the 1980s and early ’90s, he appeared as Medea de Vyse at parties and events throughout Williamsburg, including ones held in Arcadia, which was once on the other side of the steel door. Read More