And now, as they say, for something completely different.
Just nine months after finishing up his woeful production of Wagner’s Ring cycleat the Metropolitan Opera, the director Robert Lepage has done an about-face. He has abandoned the technical wizardry of the Ring—the 3-D video projections, the enormous rotating set—and pared back his style. Read More
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
Near the end of Robert Lepage’s production of Wagner’s Die Walküre, which opened at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, there is a moment of arresting visual beauty. The raked stage slowly rises and, with the help of projections, turns into a looming, stark, snow-covered mountain. It’s a breathtaking transformation, one that encapsulates everything that’s wrong Read More
In Robert Lepage’s program notes for his production of an evening of Igor Stravinsky’s short musical fables, which opened in Toronto in 2009 and came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music a few weeks ago, the director remarks on how curious it is that, given the high style and complexity of opera in general and Read More
In last week’s column I argued in favor of the awesome simplicity of Peter Brook’s production of The Grand Inquisitor—that its complete lack of video effects amounted to a revolutionary statement nowadays. Mr. Brook has steadfastly avoided using the fashionable technological stuff (the computer-generated illusions, film projections, video images, infrared cameras, scrims and so on) Read More
My joy in the revolutionary work of the Québécois genius, Robert Lepage, is no secret. I love him even when he goes wrong. Because he takes big, imaginative risks, because even when he falters, there’s always something that blows your mind.
There’s no one quite like him-and how I wish there were! His happy marriage Read More
I was watching Pete Sampras lose a match he should have won blindfolded. Here was the best player in the world, a cultivated assassin in his winning lethal way, unable to beat an average player who wasn’t in the top 100. It was as if he couldn’t even play the game! There were flashes of Read More
