Verdi’s Jewish Opera Grandly Staged at the Metropolitan

Nabucco is widely seen as a political opera. But while Verdi’s nationalist operas have mostly dropped out of the repertory of major venues, Nabucco is still performed widely, in part because it has better music, and also because it is not so much a nationalist opera as a religious one. With the arguable exception of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Nabucco is the most Jewish of operas, with a deeply sympathetic portrayal of the First Exile. David P. Goldman, Tablet

Baritone George Gagnidze makes his Met role debut as the imperious king Nabucco, alongside soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska reprising her thrilling turn as his vengeful daughter Abigaille. Mezzo-soprano Maria Barakova and tenor SeokJong Baek, in his company debut, are Fenena and Ismaele, whose love transcends politics, and bass Dmitry Belosselskiy repeats his celebrated portrayal of the high priest Zaccaria. Daniele Callegari conducts Verdi’s exhilarating early masterpiece, which features the ultimate showcase for the great Met Chorus, the moving “Va, pensiero.” Al Metropolitan fino al prossimo 26 gennaio.

Adrienne Kennedy

 

Kennedy, who is eighty-nine, is one of our greatest and least definable living playwrights, restlessly inventive and ruthlessly unshy about the pressures exerted by history upon our lives. If one motif hums through her work (besides herself: she is our foremost artist of theatrical autobiography), it is a nagging, sometimes unbearable suspicion that the past has hijacked the present. Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker

A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof

Il titolo completo è: Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof. L'autrice è Alisa Solomon, prof. alla scuola di giornalismo della Columbia e la casa editrice Metropolitan Books.

"As for Tevye—well, that’s a story too. Like every mythic figure, he’s been shaped and reshaped in the telling, adapted to the needs of successive artists and audiences. The icon who has circled the globe at the center of Fiddler on the Roof, the personification of shtetl nostalgia, at one with “tradition” and his arcadian community, is very different from the complex, ironic, ambivalent character that Sholem Aleichem [nella foto] built up, story by episodic story, over the course of more than 20 years, in intimate contact with his Yiddish-speaking readership. That transformation, broadly speaking, is the subject of Wonder of Wonders. Alisa Solomon’s subtitle is, if anything, too modest. Her book is nothing less than a cultural history of American Jewry as refracted through its most celebrated artifact. Fiddler, which debuted in 1964, is placed within its moment. ... 

But what exactly did that Jewishness consist of? If Fiddler marked the early days of multiculturalism, it also represented the climax of the process by which the Jews of Eastern Europe were rendered safe for their grandchildren, reduced to a set of reassuring stereotypes—poverty and piety, laughter and tears, candlesticks and chicken soup and “warmth”—that preserved them not so much in amber as in schmaltz. The paintings of Chagall, the photographs of Roman Vishniac (redacted to eliminate signs of prosperity or modernity), books like Life Is With People (1952) and, indeed, The World of Sholem Aleichem (1943): for the new suburbanizing Jews, those Unitarians with yarmulkes, such artifacts performed a complicated kind of psychic work. They gave them a past to adore, but also one that they could proudly leave behind". William Deresiewicz, theatlantic.

Relatively Speaking

Foto di Annie Leibovitz

This fall, the distinctive voices of three giant American authors can be heard under the same roof when a collection of their one-act plays, Relatively Speaking, opens on Broadway. The voices belong to Woody Allen, Elaine May, and Ethan Coen, the roof to the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. ... The plays are being directed by John Turturro. vanityfair.