Philadelphia

Dorothea Röschmann and Mitsuko Uchida (Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, April 2015)

I had the good fortune this week to attend one of the finest Lieder recitals I’ve heard in many years, by soprano […]

Something magical happens 30 minutes into Penelope. It begins when Quinn, a middle-aged man, unflatteringly clad in a speedo, babbles on with […]

“All the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare tells us – and director Blanka Zizka seems to take it literally. Her busy, incohesive production of […]

By the time I was of listening age (that is, in my early teens, around 1970), operetta performances, at least in the […]

Thou wouldst be great; Art not without ambition, but without The illness should attend it. Thus Shakespeare’s Lady pithily sums up her […]

Remember that Robert Frost’s poem about the importance of taking the right road? Well, Monday night, I took the low road – and […]

Every time I immerse myself in Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos (and I do, often – decades ago, I even wrote […]

It hit me the minute the curtain went up on The Whale, Samuel D. Hunter’s marvelous, heartbreaking play, in an exceptionally fine […]

“Sometimes – there’s God – so quickly!,” Tennessee Williams famously wrote. Here, though, He doesn’t show up till 9:15. Roughly 70 minutes […]

The great thing about Doubt, John Patrick Shanley’s slender but effective drama about child abuse in the church, is that our sympathies […]