Published: 3/31/2010
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
Kimwana Doner is sitting in a lounge atop the Detroit Opera House, and her posture is perfect. She's talking eloquently of a whore and a stalker. The city's northern skyline is splayed out below, juxtaposing the park where the Tigers play and the barren expanse just beyond it. "Take Flora,&qu...[MORE]
Published: 11/4/1998
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
Opera often inhabits a deliciously deranged world. There are few more dramatically urgent and musically elevating scenes than when the heroine loses her marbles -- usually to the tune of flowery musical passage work. Celebrated mad scenes can be found...[MORE]
Published: 6/7/2006
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
Marquita Lister is a young soprano. She refuses to say how young (early 30s is a good guess), yet she has already made herself recognizable to Michigan Opera Theatre audiences — as Aida in 1997 and as the murderous, passionate Tosca in an incandescent performance in 2000. She's also tak...[MORE]
Published: 6/7/2006
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
In the couple of decades since the triumphantly villainous film Heathers, the machinations of teenage girls — specifically, princesses with raging hormones and lousy parents — have become a cliché. But back in 1894, when Oscar Wilde wrote the one-act play Salome, it was not comm...[MORE]
Published: 4/26/2006
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
After stepping out of Michigan Opera Theatre's winning, million-dollar production of Aida last Saturday night, it's difficult to remember those first couple of seasons in the Detroit Opera House. When restoration began a decade ago on what was to be the first permanent home for Michigan Opera ...[MORE]
Published: 9/22/2004
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
The Detroit Opera House offers not only a lush and gilded interior, but local and international talent providing world-class opera as well as ballet. Highlights for the 2004-2005 season at the Opera House, home of the Michigan Opera Theatre, include the Italian season opener Rigoletto Oct. 23-3...[MORE]
Published: 5/19/2004
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
Manny and the Mirror is a homegrown rock opera, a psychedelic psychological trip into the closets of the mind fortified by a sound track that runs the gamut from acoustic folk to rocking seedy cabaret. The piece of musical theater captures the universal appeal of storytelling and the art of sound....[MORE]
By W. Kim Heron
Published: 3/3/2004
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
To the best of our knowledge, you are now reading the first music-event preview ever to involve contacting the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s office. Or any medical examiner, for that manner. Composer Steve Jones’ Forgotten: The Murder at the Ford Rouge Plant may or may not become a hit, thoug...[MORE]
Published: 12/18/2002
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
Light from the stained-glass windows gleams bright gold against the dark sky. I climb the steps of the old stone Metropolitan Methodist Church and tug open the big door. From an upper room somewhere, the sound of singing descends — beautiful, ethereal and strangely warming after my trek through th...[MORE]
Published: 6/7/2000
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
Few operas generate such lively and analytical discussion as Benjamin Britten’s 1945 work Peter Grimes. This is no moth-eaten, conventional operatic tale about a lovesick tenor and a fragile soprano. Ostensibly, the story centers on a lone-wolf fisherman, Peter Grimes, who’s accused of abusing, an...[MORE]
Published: 4/19/2000
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
Richard Strauss’ 1911 opera Der Rosenkavalier (The Knight of the Rose) is a delicate balancing act on several levels, juggling sadness and comedy, resignation and hope, reality and illusion. Michigan Opera Theatre’s production occasionally upsets the bittersweet balance, erring too heavily on the ...[MORE]
Published: 10/6/1999
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
Though it’s well sung, in the main, and the pace travels at a merry gait, Michigan Opera Theatre’s production of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville has virtually no dramatic propulsion. You just don’t get the sense that the characters are motivated. They plot and scheme, but they seem merely to be go...[MORE]
By Kristin Palm
Published: 9/8/1999
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
Well-loved classics and bold new works are ripening in time for the fall theater season. The Theatre Company at the University of Detroit Mercy covers both categories with its first two productions, opening its season with Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in celebration of the play’s 50th anniv...[MORE]
Published: 4/21/1999
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
It’s more than a little misguided to interpret Cio-cio-san – aka Butterfly – in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, as a vulnerable naïf with emotions of china-cup fragility. True, she’s only 15 and enters into a relationship with moonstruck awe. But here’s a character who knows something of the ways of t...[MORE]
By George Tysh
Published: 3/21/2001
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
Moving opera into the realm of the hyper-technological is vidGod, a new work premiering this week (Thu., March 22-Sat., March 24) at the University of Michigan. With staging and book by U-M art professor Michael Rodemer and music by U-M music professor Stephen Rush, the production promises to overtu...[MORE]
Published: 5/13/1998
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
Donizetti's bantamweight opera The Elixir of Love is all bubbles and froth &emdash; puddle-deep in substance but teeming with an ocean of high spirits and lilting melodies. Well, that's the way it should come across, but the carbonation meter at the Detroit O...[MORE]
Published: 4/22/1998
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
It was a night of firsts last Saturday at the Detroit Opera House, yet nothing about the evening suggested inexperience. It was Michigan Opera Theatre's premiere of Jules Massenet's Manon, and although soprano Ruth Ann Swenson is a seasoned MOT veteran, she wa...[MORE]
Published: 10/22/1997
Types: Arts, Performing arts, Opera
Good is supposed to win out over evil in Mozart's fairy-tale opera The Magic Flute, but the wicked Queen of the Night triumphs as the finest voice in Michigan Opera Theatre's production at the Detroit Opera House. The performance is a mixed bag, but let's dispense with the good news first. S...[MORE]
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