Karren Alenier is a swing-dancing poet whose opera, Gertrude Stein Invents A Jump Early On, with composer William Banfield and New York City’s Encompass New Opera Theatre artistic director Nancy Rhodes premiered in New York City in June 2005. She writes a monthly column for scene4.com entitled "The Steiny Road to Operadom." Read about her forthcoming book on opera—The Steiny Road to Operadom: The Making of American Operas at alenier.blogspot.com.
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Writes in: Art & Architecture, Books & CDs, Dance, Film, Music, Television, and Theater.
MusicDC,
Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) composed Acis et Galatee to honor the Grand Dauphin, the son of Louis XIV. In the literary tradition of the day, the libretto, written by a minor playwright named Jean Galbert de Campistron, opens with direct address ...
Theater
Fallen From Proust, a new play by by Norman Allen, is an entertaining comedy about relationships. Its fast-paced, clever dialogue is reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Like Wilde’s comedy of manners and satire on Victorian ...
Theater
Hallelujah, Baby! boasts a stellar list of musical theater artists: playwright Arthur Laurents (West Side Story and Gypsy), the composer Jule Styne (Funny Girl and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), and lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green (authors of such songs ...
Theater
As the wider than usual curtain sweeps across the stage, the music of The Highest Yellow in minimalist repetition announces that something out of the ordinary is commencing. The musical repetition suggests inebriation, maybe an out-of-body experience, but clearly ...
Theater
What happens when people refuse to change, will not accept technological advances, and do not know how to cope in a world that has passed them by? Playwright Nilo Cruz explores these predicaments in his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Anna ...
Books & CDs
Madame Butterfly: Japonisme, Puccini, and the Search for the Real Cho-Cho-San by Jan van Rij is an engaging hobbyist’s project. The author’s thesis— the search for the real Madame Butterfly, also know as Cho-Cho-San—is not a new topic but ...
Music
Strasburg Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Jan Latham-Koenig: Dialogues Des Carmelites (1999) DVD In Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, overcoming fear is the hurdle a young woman named Blanche de la Force must face in order to ...
Dance
Wolf Trap presented a remarkable collaboration between the vibrant Parsons Dance Company, the sexy and intense Ahn Trio, and the new music composer Kenji Bunch, who contributed all of the music for the second half of this exhilarating show ...
Music
Our capsule review of the 1998 San Francisco world premiere of the opera the film with Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh DVD the film with Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh VHS ...
