Results tagged “metropolitanopera”

Today was the opportunity to go to your local movie Cineplex (the Hacienda or the Emery 10 in Emeryville) and watch the live HD broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera matinee. We kinda blew it, as it’s a bit late for today, the screening starts at 10:30am on the west coast. But you’ll have three more opportunites to catch the show live from New-York: Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin" on Feb. 24th, Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" , on March 24th, and Puccini's "Il Trittico" on April 28th.

Commissioning a new opera remains a relatively rare thing nowadays: audiences have acquired familiarity with a given repertoire and they do not necessarily like to be pushed towards modern and unknown musics. Yet companies try to introduce fresh air in their program now and then, as the SF Opera did earlier this year with Dr. Atomic, and as the Metropolitan Opera in NY did last week with an American Tragedy.

There is a certain type of theatergoer who, upon seeing Joan Crawford turn, a sudden spotlight on her furious eyes and her dark lips snarled in melodrama, cannot help but cream themselves. Of those types of theatergoers, Charles Busch is king, and more often, queen; he's made an acting career out of evoking the acting style of film divas of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Sometimes somber, mostly hilarious, "The Lady in Question is Charles Busch" is a biography described by one of its creators as a "love letter to Charles" five years in the making. It covers his roots -- being taken to the Metropolitan Opera House at the age of seven, and a deep obsession with classic womens' films that nearly caused him to fail out of school -- through his early professional career in a sketchy off-off-Broadway theater, and his later work as a film star and the author of "The Tale of the Allergist's Wife," a mainstream Broadway hit.