![]() ![]() Will they escape the clutches of hungry, flesh-eating aliens in time for this year's Corn Fest?Ībduction has received a production in 2017 at Chicago's Stage 773, a concert at Columbia College Chicago in 2018, a reading at the 2019 New York Musical Theater Festival (Audience Choice Runner Up), a workshop production at Musical Theatre Artists of Pittsburgh (MTAP) in 2021, and won Second Prize in New Musicals Inc. Pippa must convince everyone of the grave danger they're truly in, all while coming to terms with her cozy hometown's many flaws. An alarming wave of speculative misinformation leads her neighbors to hypothesize the light she saw was everything from Bill Gates to the return of Jesus Christ. Pieffer, and music by Becki Toth and Brad Kemp, Abduction tells the story of high school senior and student body president Pippa Peterson whose social footing crumbles after she witnesses an alien abduction in her tiny suburban town of Pluto. Selected to be in the 2019 New York Musical festival as a reading!.Selected to BE MTAP'S inaugural incubator production!. ![]() ![]() Martin Kettle’s review of the full Bayreuth Ring cycle will be published on Monday 8 August. Daniel Kirch is an elegantly sung Loge and Okke von der Damerau brings a touch of old school operatic grandeur to Erda. Olafur Sigurdarson stands out as Alberich, though there were some strains on opening night. Egils Silins is a light voiced Wotan, even more absurdly imprisoned in his Valhalla delusions than ever. Vocally, Bayreuth standards are more often decent than stellar these days. And the potential purging of a rotten and heartless world is the enduring Wagnerian theme of themes. The school-uniformed girls he tyrannises may be embryonic Valkyries. The young abductee, brutalised and feral, is Götterdämmerung’s Hagen in the making. Predictably, in this Ring with no gold and no ring, the staging, in Andrea Cozzi’s eclectic sets and Andy Besuch’s costumes, dispenses with all other Wagnerian props.Īll the same, there are pregnant possibilities. Even in Rheingold, much was brushed aside. The larger question is whether it is an idea that can be sustained over the whole of the Ring without mangling what Wagner wrote. ![]() Gods and monsters… Egils Silins as Wotan (far left) and Daniel Kirch as Loge (far right) at the Bayreuth festival production 2022. It is a jolting and topical predatory moment, and the idea that the original sin that drives the Ring and the world of power is in fact the abuse of children is a searing one. This is certainly true of Schwarz’s concept-heavy production, in which Rheingold opens in a children’s paddling pool in an Arcadian setting, from which Alberich, renouncing love for no obvious reason, seizes a young boy in a gold football shirt under the noses of jaunty Rheinmaiden nannies. The baton passed to the Stuttgart opera music director Cornelius Meister, who opened the Ring with a well-paced, fluent account of Das Rheingold, beautifully played by the Bayreuth festival orchestra.īigger tests are to come as the cycle unfolds. There have been changes of director, delays caused by the pandemic, power struggles within the festival itself and, less than three weeks ago, the conductor Pietari Inkinen was forced to pull out because of Covid (Bayreuth says he will be back next year). Bayreuth’s new Ring has been longer in the making than planned since the last cycle in 2017. ![]()
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