“Under Schwarz, 53, [Theater] Basel was chosen last year as ‘Opera House of the Year’ in the German-speaking world in a survey of critics…. The Deutsche Oper, the largest of Berlin’s three opera houses and the second biggest in Germany with 1,865 seats, hired Donald Runnicles as the new music director this season.”
Tag: 01.14.10
Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play
A new study by that title has ignited controversy in the theater world, with playwrights “see[ing] the nation’s major nonprofit theater companies as impediments to their work,” company leaders “view[ing] playwrights as insufficiently savvy about the cold realities of the business” and some observers calling discontented playwrights self-serving whiners.
The Problem With Hurricane Placido
At age 69, he blows in and out of one town after another, singing, conducting, and (nominally) running two now-troubled companies, Los Angeles Opera and Washington National Opera. His critics argue that “it is sometimes hard to get a decision from Mr. Domingo, that his artistic ambitions have outstripped economic realities, and that both companies are struggling from the lack of a firm local hand.”