Debra Cash
Composer James MacMillan’s musical strategy in this opera is a stylistic patchwork that seems to mean to convey that each character inhabits a different, mutually misunderstood world.
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones. — John Cage to Richard Kostelanetz, 1988
What kind of culture is produced by a society that lives and governs itself by opinion polls?
At first glance, Oz and Oz-Salzberger’s “Jews and Words” seems to be an unexceptional if elegantly written and occasionally witty contribution to the Jewish bookshelf.
This version of “La Belle et la Bête” never commits to a through-line about how its metaphors and rich visual imagery are supposed to operate.
Cut out of translucent and colored ox or donkey hide (sorry, PETA), they are foot and a half tall, two-dimensional figures operated by rods set up behind a slightly canted screen.
Over the next 90 minutes, Faye Driscoll and Aaron Mattocks stepped, bounced, shrieked and scrabbled through a series of 20 to 30-count episodes, much of it having to do with orality.
Where “Little Rhapsodies” is a ballet that winks with the implication that no one will really get hurt, “Crisis Variations”, choreographed last season, lurches into the void.
Anna Sokolow’s art was the gift of distillation, designed around the choreographic mot juste and saying only that and nothing else. Performed by the right dancers, adequately coached, that simplicity can be resonant.
The latest play by the celebrated Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua is a historical drama that revolves around an imaginary conversation between two major political rivals about Zionism and the founding of Israel. Israeli Stage is presenting the American premiere of a staged reading of the script.
Arts Remembrance: Sonny Rollins, Jazz’s ‘Saxophone Colossus,’ Dies at 95