For the first opera of its 2017-18 season, Palm Beach Opera handed its audience a gift. In mounting a box-office surety in Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, the company was doing its best to make sure it had a sizable audience for its first mainstage production of the year. And on the afternoon of Jan. 28, the Kravis Center house was gratifyingly huge. But in bringing this opera … [Read more...]
‘Pirates’ brings PB Opera season to smart, funny close
The operettas of William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan might not be the kind of touchstone they once were in American culture, but that fact gives professional opera companies room to do the works as they should be done: With thorough fealty to scripts and their often underrated scores. This past weekend, Palm Beach Opera closed its season by fulfilling that mission, … [Read more...]
PB Opera wraps season with Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Pirates of Penzance’
Time was when the English comic operettas of William Schwenk Gilbert (words) and Arthur Sullivan (music) were a regular feature of amateur theatrical activity around this country. It had been that way since the late 1870s, when a national craze in the U.S. for one of their shows, H.M.S. Pinafore, monopolized the popular culture, with theater troupes presenting pirated … [Read more...]
Beautifully sung ‘Butterfly’ opens PB Opera season
There are any number of tragic female heroines in the centuries since opera was created, but it’s hard to think of one more sympathetic than the Japanese geisha Cio-Cio-San, traduced by her caddish American husband and forced to take the only way out she knows. That’s Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and for this opera to come across successfully, it’s important that the … [Read more...]