By Robert Croan Florida Grand Opera has a real winner in its revival of Kevin Puts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Silent Night, which opened at Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center on Nov. 15, and will be repeated in Fort Lauderdale’s Broward Center on Dec. 4 and 6. Commissioned and premiered by Minnesota Opera in 2011, Puts’s opera is based on a real World War I event that inspired … [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...]