REVIEW: A Brilliant Savoy Soap Opera is Ruddigore (GSVLOC) Arts Dance Music Opera Theatre by Basil Considine - March 20, 2022April 1, 2022 Part of the cover plate for the original vocal score of Ruddigore, prior to the opera's renaming. Had the comic opera writing duo W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan lived a half-century later, they would have assuredly written for the emergent genre of the day: television soap operas. If they had lived
PREVIEW: Skylark’s Eugene Onegin and Pushkin’s Operatic Life Arts Music Opera by Basil Considine - February 12, 2022February 12, 2022 A sketch by Alexander Pushkin for Eugene Onegin, showing the dueling scene. On March 25, Skylark Opera Theatre opens its pandemic-delayed production of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. This vivid opera, adapting the Pushkin novel of the same name, explores the full force of Russian Romanticism in its story and score. It
NEWS: Beloved Arts Reporter Passes Away Arts Dance Music Opera Theatre Visual Arts by Twin Cities Arts Reader - September 27, 2021September 27, 2021 Pamela Espeland, a beloved arts reporter and fixture of Twin Cities journalism, passed away on Sunday, September 26. Her weekly Artscape column for MinnPost was a regular centerpiece of arts coverage.A multi-talented author and editor, Pamela was a graduate of Carleton College in Northfield, MN. As a copywriter, she worked
REVIEW: Harmony Plunges Into the Ives of Summer (Seagle Festival/Schroon Lake, NY) Arts Music Opera by Basil Considine - August 15, 2021August 15, 2021 Victoria Erickson (as Harmony Twitchell), Joel Clemens (as Charles Ives), and Jake Goz (as Dr. David Twitchell) in the Seagle Festival's premiere of Harmony by Robert Carl & Russell Banks. How does the oldest summer singer training program in the country respond to a pandemic? When you're the Seagle Festival – a
NEWS: Live Performance COVID-19 Vaccination Requirements Spreading Arts Dance Music Opera Theatre by Twin Cities Arts Reader - August 13, 2021August 14, 2021 A transmission electron microscopic image of an isolate from the first U.S. case of COVID-19, formerly known as 2019-nCoV. The spherical viral particles, colorized blue, contain cross-sections through the viral genome, seen as black dots. Image courtesy of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and generated by Hannah A.
PREVIEW: Opera on the Lake Strikes Back Arts Music Opera Theatre by Amy Donahue - July 27, 2021July 27, 2021 It's summer in Minnesota, which means it's officially Lake Time. By the lake, in the lake, on the lake – we're not the Land of 10,000 Lakes for nothing. This makes the return of the Opera on the Lake festival to Lake Como this week as natural as sweet corn at
NEWS: Ordway to Throw Doors Open in September Arts Dance Music Opera Theatre by Twin Cities Arts Reader - June 3, 2021June 4, 2021 The facade of the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in Saint Paul, MN. Photo by Mike Boeckmann. The Arts Partnership announced today that the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Saint Paul will reopen for performances beginning this September. The September shows will be the Ordway's first in-person,
REVIEW: Stirring The Planet – A Lament (PROTOTYPE Festival) Arts Dance Music Opera Theatre by Amy Donahue - January 15, 2021January 15, 2021 A video still from Garin Nugroho’s The Planet – A Lament, now playing in the 2021 virtual incarnation of the PROTOTYPE festival. It was with profound jealousy that I first learned of the PROTOTYPE festival of new music-theatre works. My editor had traveled to New York City to see the festival
INTERVIEW: Taking the Multi-Site PROTOTYPE Festival Online in a Pandemic Arts Dance Music Opera Theatre by Basil Considine - January 8, 2021January 15, 2021 A visual collage of six works featured in the 2021 PROTOTYPE festival. Clockwise from upper left: TIMES3, Wide Slumber Lepidopteris, Ocean Body, The Planet – A Lament, Modulation, and The Murder of Halit Yozgat. For lovers of new music-theatre, there are few events more exciting than the annual PROTOTYPE festival held
PREVIEW: Minnesota Opera Returns…to the Baseball Stadium? Arts Music Opera Theatre by Basil Considine - September 24, 2020September 24, 2020 CHS Field at sunset. Photo courtesy of Minnesota Opera. When you hear "Take Me Out to the Ballgame", opera is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. Yes, there are opera singers who've sung the national anthem. Over in football land, you might even call the hullabaloo around the