Opera Ville
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Operaville is a blog by Michael J. Vaughn on opera, classiacl music, theatre. Michael J. Vaughn is the author of seventeen novels, including The Popcorn Girl and Billy Saddle.
Opera Ville
1M ago
Richard Thomas’s
Jerry Springer the Opera
3Below Theater
February 24, 2024
Seeing Jerry Springer the Opera is something like being dumped into a latrine and coming back out with a handful of diamonds. You’ll be richer for the experience, but you will need to do some laundry. And take a shower, you stinky fuck!
Sorry. It’s just that this show is filthy, and it really revs up the potty mouth. Thomas makes it worse by taking the worst of these swear-bombs and turning them into little neoclassical ditties. My favorite is “What the fucking fucking fuck!” (You see, on the real Jerry they would b ..read more
Opera Ville
1M ago
Photo by David Allen
Opera San Jose
February 17, 2024
The opening scene of Opera San Jose’s Rigoletto is so intense and perfect that it may lift you right out of your seat. It has a lot to do with Steven C. Kemp’s uber-masculine set, black pillars with blood-red draperies. And Mr. Howard Tsvi Kaplan’s costumes, dark with metallic inlays, which make the Mantuan court look like some badass medieval street gang.
It has mostly to do with the jester Rigoletto and his boss-enemy, the Duke. Eugene Brancoveanu brings to the former a servile desperation with an underlying air of dang ..read more
Opera Ville
4M ago
In Michael J. Vaughn's new novel, Punks for the Opera, marketing wiz Marina Quantrill takes two surprising new connections and creates Punks for the Opera, a benefit for San Francisco Opera's community outreach program by four area punk bands. Halfway through the evening, things are not quite the blockbuster she was hoping for, but things are about to change...
Snatcher takes the stage in very unexpected clothing. Macy wears crisp white breeches, a scarlet waistcoat over a Cramps T-shirt, and a black tricorner hat. Jane has a powdered wig, a foot tall. And Lily wears a pink 18th centur ..read more
Opera Ville
4M ago
The Barber of Seville
Opera San Jose
November 11, 2023
It’s pretty rare to find an opera production that checks off absolutely every box, but Opera San Jose’s definitely got one. Their Barber is vocally scintillating, brilliantly funny, and madly entertaining.
Beginning at the beginning, the overture just makes me smile. Regardless of certain (ahem!) animated connections, or the fact that it was appropriated from Rossini’s earlier opera, Aureliano in Palmira, those familiar, playful passages warm up an operagoer’s heart in the most delightful fashion.
First thing, we’ve got a gang ..read more
Opera Ville
5M ago
Van Sciver’s GirondinesMission Opera
October 29, 2023
Santa Clarita, CA
A few months ago I had the pleasure of reviewing a CD, a new work from composer Sarah van Sciver and librettist Kirsten C. Kunkle. Girondines tells the story of six extraordinary women who took on the Jacobins during the violent chaos of the French Revolution. The most famous of these (perhaps infamous) is Charlotte Corday, whose bathtub assassination of Jacobin leader Marat was portrayed in the well-known painting by David.
The work posits the notion that these women likely met and discussed the intense political issu ..read more
Opera Ville
7M ago
Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette
September 9, 2023
Opera San Jose
OSJ opened its 40th anniversary by bringing back R&J after a 17-year absence, and it’s a welcome return. The score is beautiful, pointing backward to Mozart, forward to Massenet, and despite its everpresence in modern culture (in both original and West Side forms), the story still offers poignant and infuriating moments.
The production is also the first that Shawna Lucey has stage directed since becoming OSJ's general director and CEO. Her work in this production immediately establishes the primacy of dance-like movement. This ..read more
Opera Ville
11M ago
Corey Bryant as Balaga
Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812
San Jose Playhouse
April 29, 2023
To quote that other highly unusual 2010s musical, it would have been great to be “in the room” when someone came up with the idea for Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. “Let’s dramatize 70 pages of Tolstoy’s War and Peace using Russian folk music, musical theater ballads and electronic dance music.” Sure! Why not? A dozen 2017 Tony nominations later, it would seem that the crazy idea worked.
The other meeting must have come at San Jose Playhouse, where someone ask ..read more
Opera Ville
1y ago
Adrian Kramer as Cavaradossi,
Maria Natale as Tosca.
Photos by David Allen
Opera San Jose, Puccini's Tosca, April 14, 2023
It’s amazing to see how a few seemingly minor details can have an enormous effect on an opera. OSJ stage director Tara Branham’s small innovations, combined with an energetic, blunt approach, led to a different and provocative Tosca.
The opera’s opening is usually a mildly comic back-and-forth between the sacristan (a divinely grumpy Igor Vieira) and the painter Cavaradossi. Branham introduces a young lady with whom the painter is having a tryst. This prod ..read more
Opera Ville
1y ago
Opera San Jose
Falstaff
February 11, 2023
Chanae Curtis as Alice Ford.
Opera San Jose’s production of Verdi’s final opera is a madly entertaining evening, thanks to a superb cast, a repurposing of Steven C. Kemp’s imaginative 2013 set design, and a high level of comic energy under stage director Jose Maria Condemi. All of which serves to underscore the brilliance of an opera that is probably not performed as often as it should be.
It all begins with our titular character, of course, and baritone Darren Lekeith Drone is perfection. He carries the big man’s great lusty presence ..read more
Opera Ville
1y ago
Sunday in the Park with George
San Jose Playhouse
December 3, 2022
“Writing about music is like dancing about furniture.” *
I would have loved to be in on that meeting between Stephen Sondheim, writer James Lapine and their producers, sometime in the early ‘80s. It would have been very “It’s a show about nothing!” Or “It’s a hip-hop biography of Alexander Hamilton!”
Or, perhaps “It’s a musical about a painting!”
You couldn’t have blamed the committee of angels for questioning the mental health of their artist friends. And perhaps it’s fitting, because Georges Seurat likely got the same reac ..read more