Opera Review

[This post has been upated.] Can't get to Madrid for the world premiere of Philip Glass' Walt Disney Opera? "The Perfect American," a fictionalized account of Disney's final days, will be broadcast live online on Wednesday, with the video available for free up to three months after. "The Perfect American" will be streamed on medici.tv starting at 11 a.m. Pacific time on Wednesday. Viewing the live webcast is free; registration is required for viewing the archived video, according to a spokeswoman.

SAN DIEGO - Devout opera companies caring to connect with Holy Week easily can. Along with the obvious choice of Wagner's "Parsifal," contemporary composers such as Harrison Birtwistle ("The Last Supper") and John Adams ("The Gospel According to the Other Mary") have been contributing to the cause. On Easter Eve, San Diego Opera looked a little further afield, however, by offering the first major American production of Ildebrando Pizzetti's "Murder in the Cathedral" at Civic Theatre.

MADRID - Walt Disney was hardly a perfect American. He may have been the most famous and beloved American during his lifetime. But his private magic kingdom was not always the happiest place on Earth. Disney had his own private torments and is reputed to have railed against unions, blacks and Jews. At least that is part of the 21st century Disney legend, and it is necessarily part of Philip Glass' new opera, "The Perfect American. " Far from sterilized yet also disarmingly affectionate, it looks at Disney the myth, the artist and the man. The work contrasts between the America that formed Walt Disney and the America he formed for the rest of us. And that is what makes Disney a perfect American opera character, even if it took Spain to bring Glass' "The Perfect American" to the lyric stage.

Composer Mark-Anthony Turnage's biographical opera of the late Anna Nicole Smith will jiggle its way to the U.S. in September in a production from the New York City Opera. The piece will be staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is co-producing.  "Anna Nicole" had its world premiere in 2011 at the Royal Opera House in London. The opera, with a libretto by Richard Thomas, follows Smith's rise to fame and her marriage at the age of 26 to the then-89-year-old oil magnate J. Howard Marshall.  In the London production, Smith was played by Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek.

It took seven years for "The Face," a new opera by composer Donald Crockett and poet David St. John, to get from its inception to its world-premiere staging at the Aratani/Japan America Theatre on Saturday night - and when three of its characters sing the lines, "What a long 11 months it's been, the movie's in the can," you wonder if art is mimicking life. Indeed, "The Face" strikes me as a collection of poetry that is still striving with all its might to become an opera, and it won't be easy for a narrative-driven opera audience to follow without an advance reading of the synopsis.

SAN DIEGO - Devout opera companies caring to connect with Holy Week easily can. Along with the obvious choice of Wagner's "Parsifal," contemporary composers such as Harrison Birtwistle ("The Last Supper") and John Adams ("The Gospel According to the Other Mary") have been contributing to the cause. On Easter Eve, San Diego Opera looked a little further afield, however, by offering the first major American production of Ildebrando Pizzetti's "Murder in the Cathedral" at Civic Theatre.

And now, from the folks who brought you "Nixon in China". . . . The opera, of course, is "The Death of Klinghoffer," a rambling, quasi-moralistic sociopolitical treatise with semi-minimalist music by John Adams and a self-consciously poetic libretto by Alice Goodman.

SAN FRANCISCO - A production here of John Adams' "Nixon in China" begins with a goose-bump gorgeous projection on a scrim in front of the stage of Air Force One gracefully gliding into Beijing through slate gray clouds on a winter's day. Lawrence Renes, a Dutch conductor in his early 40s making his San Francisco Opera debut, creates a viscerally silky sound from Adams' brilliantly atmospheric orchestral prologue. The rest of Michael Cavanagh's production, a product of Vancouver Opera, may not entirely live up to this beginning, but the specialness of the moment is significant.

The program magazine at the Civic Theatre on Saturday heralded Mozart's "Magic Flute." But the San Diego Opera presented no such thing. For better or worse--probably worse--this was "Die Zauberflote." It was performed with even more German dialogue than one normally encounters in American houses. Ironically, there wasn't a single German on the stage. There cannot have been many Germans out front.

The ambitious new "Carmen" staged by Nuria Espert at the Music Center Opera on Wednesday began ominously. The curtain rose prematurely (modern directors cannot bear to have the audience listen to the orchestra) to disclose what turned out to be an all-purpose set with a pretty lady in white framed in an arch. The pretty lady turned out to be the tempestuous heroine. Alone on the empty stage, Carmen cautiously traipsed forward to the strains of the fate motive, then doubled over.

This post has been updated. "The Death of Klinghoffer," the controversial 1991 opera by John Adams, is scheduled to make its much-belated Los Angeles-area debut in March 2014. But the producing company won't be L.A. Opera, which was one of several groups that commissioned the piece. Long Beach Opera said it will present the work as part of its season next year, in a staging directed by James Robinson. The dates and venue for the performances have not been announced.  In April 2014, the production will be part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's recently announced "Minimalist Jukebox" festival.

Prolifically produced worldwide since its 1979 premiere, Peter Colley's comically dark thriller, “I'll Be Back Before Midnight” now receives a belated Los Angeles premiere at the Colony in Burbank. Stephen Gifford's moldering farmhouse set, lighted with creepy virtuosity by Luke Moyer, is the ideal milieu for Colley's roller-coaster play, which contains the kind of stomach-dropping twists that will make you hoot with laughter even as you clutch your theater companion's sleeve.

Banana Joe, the lovable affenpinscher who won best in show at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in New York on Tuesday, has chosen Broadway for a victory lap.  The pooch was scheduled to make a cameo appearance Wednesday evening in the Broadway revival of the musical "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" at Studio 54. He was to fill in the role normally played by Macaco, the dog held by actress Stephanie J. Block in the show. Banana Joe's theater career was scheduled to last for only one performance. "Drood," which is very loosely based on the unfinished novel by Charles Dickens, is produced by the Roundabout Theatre Co. The ending is determined by an audience vote as to who is guilty.

In 1986, when Luis Valdez's play “I Don't Have to Show You No Stinking Badges” premiered in Los Angeles, its portrait of an upwardly mobile Latino family in Monterey Park shattered Hollywood stereotypes. Buddy Villa wasn't a bandito or a gardener, Connie Villa wasn't a madam or a maid - they just played them in the movies, earning enough as extras to send their daughter to medical school and their son, Sonny, the play's troubled, troubling protagonist, to Harvard. Casa 0101's affectionate revival, 25 years after the last L.A. production of “Badges,” is compelling not only historically, as a benchmark for how opportunities for Latinos on stage and screen have developed (not as much as one might have hoped)

[This post has been upated.] Can't get to Madrid for the world premiere of Philip Glass' Walt Disney Opera? "The Perfect American," a fictionalized account of Disney's final days, will be broadcast live online on Wednesday, with the video available for free up to three months after. "The Perfect American" will be streamed on medici.tv starting at 11 a.m. Pacific time on Wednesday. Viewing the live webcast is free; registration is required for viewing the archived video, according to a spokeswoman.

If writers of the 20th century could be categorized by the war they lived through, today's scribes might be grouped by the blockbuster movie that came out when they were about 7. The silly, raunchy, sweet “Triassic Parq: The Musical,” at Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills suggests that the long-ascendant “Star Wars” generation is passing the torch to artists shaped by the films of the 1990s. (I am eagerly awaiting “Gump: The Musical," "Sixth...

Figaro, the baritonal barber of Seville, got married again, Saturday night at the Civic Theatre. It was a nice wedding. As its final contribution to the official season of Mozartean delirium, the San Diego Opera mustered something old (the work itself) but little new; something borrowed (sets, staging scheme and costumes) but little blue (apart from a dubious bit of would-be comedy in which Basilio sniffed Susanna's underwear). This, essentially, was "Le Nozze di Figaro" by the book.

The opera season opened here on Friday with a routine "Traviata" surrounded by gala glitz. That, it turned out, was just foreplay. The real, victorious action began on Saturday, when Lotfi Mansouri & Co. celebrated the Prokofiev centenary with the first local staging of a massive, sprawling, rarely ventured opus called "Voina y Mir." It is better known in the West as "War and Peace." Did I say massive? The score demands a vast orchestra and a heroic chorus.

In a sign of the times for small and mid-size classical music organizations, the Sacramento Opera and Sacramento Philharmonic Orchestra will merge their operations this year in order to cope with a challenging financial environment. The merger, which was reported in the Sacramento Bee, will create a new entity called the  Sacramento Region Performing Arts Alliance. Each organization will retain its own identity under the new umbrella group, Jane Hill, interim executive director for the orchestra, told the newspaper.

The 60th season of the Philharmonic Society of Orange County will feature an array of international orchestras, recitals by two of the world's preeminent female pianists and tap into the Benjamin Britten centenary. Among the highlights for 2013-14:   --The season's opening night on Oct. 4 features a recital by Van Cliburn gold-medal-winning pianist Olga Kern performing the complete Rachmaninoff Preludes.   --Pianist Yuja Wang will give an Oct. 13 recital of material yet to be announced.