Brian Kulick

To cap its 26th season, Boston Ballet will present a Soviet-American "Swan Lake," utilizing five principals of the Kirov and Bolshoi companies from the Soviet Union, five American principals, two Soviet stage directors and a North American production team. The new production is being created simultaneously in Moscow, Virginia and Boston. The company, led by artistic director Bruce Marks, will give 16 performances of "Swan Lake" in Wang Center in downtown Boston, May 2-20.

The UCLA theater department and Mark Taper Forum welcome winter with "Summer Vacation Madness," a trilogy of plays by 18th-Century Italian dramatist Carlo Goldoni which opened Friday at Taper, Too at the John Anson Ford Theater in Hollywood. The UCLA-underwritten production is the result of an ongoing relationship between the two organizations--and UCLA's recent development of a graduate-level three-year professional program.

"Stand-Up Tragedy," Bill Cain's play about hope and despair in a Manhattan Catholic boys' school, follows its Mark Taper Forum premiere and its successful run at Hartford Stage with yet a third new setting at Washington's Arena Stage. The reviews are heavily weighted in favor of director Max Mayer's vision of the piece.

Three contrasting works open the 1992-93 season of Los Angeles Music Center Opera. Of strongest interest is the new "Makropulos Case," a co-production with Deutsche Oper Berlin of Janacek's dramatic thriller. Karan Armstrong takes the title role; the conductor is Jiri Kout (who led the company's "Kat'a Kabanova"), the stage director Matthias Remus. Production designs are the handiwork of the eminent Andreas Reinhardt.

In a press conference Thursday, Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman announced a new umbrella series at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre for this summer. "Summer Nights at the Ford" will bring together 34 performances from 14 local music, dance and theater organizations, from May 31 to Sept. 12. The series is coordinated by the Los Angeles County Music and Performing Arts Commission. "We received as astonishing variety of proposals," said executive director Laura Zucker.

What's a 25-year-old director doing with a 257-year-old play? In the case of Brian Kulick, he's staging the work--Marivaux's "The Game of Love and Chance"--at Taper, Too, where it will open next Wednesday. "I feel that the way we live our lives now is kind of small and compartmentalized; we tend to narrow everything down," said Kulick, an artist-in-residence at the Taper since 1985.

Virgil Thomson used to recount a backstage conversation at the Metropolitan Opera that took place more than 50 years ago. After a performance of "Pelleas et Melisande" led by Pierre Monteux, a well-meaning patron asked the French conductor, "Do you suppose 'Pelleas' will ever really be a success?" Monteux's pointed reply: "It was never intended to be."

It's uncommon (to say the least) for an opera company to present a play, even if that play comes with some original incidental music (by Mark McGurty) and, yes, includes a few lines of song ( "J'ai ferme les yeux pour ne plus rien voir . . . ."). Surely, only an outfit as addicted to the unconventional as the Long Beach Opera would have even considered such an undertaking. Lucky for us that it did. That play--"The Guilty Mother"--is the third piece in Beaumarchais' Figaro trilogy that began with "The Barber of Seville" and "The Marriage of Figaro," operatic versions of which are on Long Beach Opera's current season.

Virgil Thomson used to recount a backstage conversation at the Metropolitan Opera that took place more than 50 years ago. After a performance of "Pelleas et Melisande" led by Pierre Monteux, a well-meaning patron asked the French conductor, "Do you suppose 'Pelleas' will ever really be a success?" Monteux's pointed reply: "It was never intended to be."

Directors and dramaturges will tell you that the basic job in working with a playwright on an untried script is to "find the play"--that is, to track down the story that seems to be asking to be told here, as distinct from the one that the playwright may think he has written. Of the two plays that closed out the Mark Taper Forum's "In the Works '85" festival over the weekend, Philip Kan Gotanda's "The Wash" seemed closer to having located itself than Kendrew Lascelles' "Legends."