Category: Sydney Opera House

  Bell Shakespeare presents THE TAMING OF THE SHREW by William Shakespeare at the Playhouse at the Sydney Opera House. “[T]he last scene is altogether disgusting to modern sensibility. No man with any decency of feeling can sit it out in the company of a woman without being extremely ashamed of the lord-of-creation moral implied in the wager and the speech put into the woman’s own mouth. Therefore the play, though still worthy of a complete and efficient representation, would need, even at that, some apology.” – George Bernard Shaw, 1897. My first consciousness of this play is the endearing…

  Opera Australia presents Cosi fan tutte (the School for Lovers). Opera in Two Acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte. English translation by Jeremy Sams. Cosi fan tutti (The School for Lovers) by Mozart and da Ponte, (English translation by Jeremy Sams) is Directed by Jim Sharman. From the erudite notes in the Opera Australia program by Antony Ernst (2009) “The operas written by Mozart to the libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte are usually regarded as the pinnacle of operatic achievement… Certainly The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni Figaro, and Cosi fan tutti are extraordinary… In…

  Opera Australia present at the Opera Theatre, Sydney Opera House FIDELIO. Opera in two acts by Ludwig van Beethoven. Libretto by Joseph Sonnleithner and Georg Friedrich Treitschke, after Jean Nicholas Bouilly’s libretto Leonore ou L’amour conjugal. This is Beethoven’s only finished opera. Written during the dominance of Napoleon on the stage of international affairs it is in the tradition of what has been called the “rescue opera” which so the program notes tell us: “Broadly speaking ,these pieces tended to cultivate ‘realistic’ settings, with a recurrent theme of the heroic release of an innocent hero from unjust imprisonment –…

  Sydney Opera House Presents THE VIENNA SCHAUSPIELHAUS Production of Barrie Kosky’s POPPEA IN THE Drama Theatre. Last Saturday I had a truly wonderful experience in the theatre at Barrie Kosky’s POPPEA. After my disappointing experience with Mr Kosky’s THE WOMEN OF TROY last year, and on seeing the publicity images of the production of POPPEA I was very resistant to attending. I tried to attend earlier (a Wednesday) but the seats were not good. I returned, on Saturday, the last day, leaving it to fate as to whether I would get in to see it. Fate was good to…

Opera Australia presents at the Opera Theatre, Sydney Opera House: I Capuleti e i Montecchi (The Capulets and the Montagues). Opera in two acts by Vincenzo Bellini. Libretto by Felice Romani. I Capuleti e i Montecchi by Bellini is a co-production with Opera North (UK) and Opera Ireland. The first thing to say is, for those of you, like myself, unfamiliar with the opera, “It’s not Shakespeare.” Based on other material prior to the Shakespeare play (Ovid etc), this story line is set in civil war between rival factions, the Capuleti and Montecchi, and like the more famous play’s story…

Photo – Marcus Graham – Pericles   Bell Shakespeare present PERICLES in Association with TAIKOZ. The Drama Theatre at the Sydney Opera House. Norrie Epstein in his book THE FRIENDLY SHAKESPEARE in his discussion of the Tragicomic Romances begins: “Fantastical, superficial, artificial, improbable, impressionistic, inferior, miraculous, boring – or the best: no one can agree on the merits of Shakespeare’s romances. The eminently reasonable Dr. Johnson dismissed them as foolish, and they are. But, in the words of the playwright Dennis Potter, they are “sweetly foolish”. With PERICLES, CYMBELINE, THE WINTER’S TALE, and THE TEMPEST we enter Shakespeare’s final period………