Fourteen Ways of Looking at What the 19th Amendment Achieved—and What It Didn’t
The 19th Amendment Project Through Sunday, Aug. 30, $2 (screening)/$25 (series) Burning Coal Theatre, Raleigh Dianna Wynn knew the 19th Amendment would make a great play. “It has all these interesting characters: antagonists, protagonists, and heroes with not-so-admirable sides to them,” says the president of Wake County’s League of Women Voters. “Theater provides a good…
The Stream Warriors: Local Artists to Watch During the Coronavirus Shutdown, Part 2
As artists take to livestreams and videos, we’re documenting the new performance archive emerging before our eyes. This edition features everything from a guy playing bass with Styrofoam to new quarantine-specific songs by Django Haskins.
Live: N.C. Opera’s Rigoletto Captures the Nuance—And Cruelty—Of Gendered Power Imbalances
N.C. Opera: Rigoletto Memorial Auditorium, Raleigh Friday, January 26, 2018 Even if you’re not an opera fan, you’ll probably still recognize “La Donna È Mobile,” the most well-known aria from Verdi’s Rigoletto. The people around me at N.C. Opera’s performance on Friday night perceptibly leaned forward in their seats as the debauched, inconstant Duke of…
Theater Review: The South Is Hard to Hear in the Opera Version of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain★★½ Thursday, Sep. 28, 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 1, 2 p.m. UNC’s Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill It’s a first principle of adaptation: the main reason to translate an artwork into another medium is to explore it more fully, to draw out facets its first form could not. Ultimately, an adaptation stands or falls on…
Fall into Theater
The recent or impending closures of high-profile theaters like Common Ground and Manbites Dog aren’t slowing down the Triangle’s theater artists this fall, who offer everything from an operatic adaptatation of Charles Frazier to a riff on Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. COLD MOUNTAIN Sep. 28–Oct. 1, N.C. Opera/Carolina Performing Arts at…
N.C. Opera’s Adventurousness Changes Minds—Yours About the Art Form and the Opera World’s About Raleigh
North Carolina Opera is not your grandparents’ opera company. Last year, the institution kicked off its season with Approaching Ali, a one-act opera about the boxer born Cassius Clay that was as light on its feet as its main subject. The current season opened with a different sort of heavyweight: Wagner’s formidable Das Rheingold, which…
Honoring the Winners of the 2016 Indies Arts Awards
2016 Winners Kelly McChesney N.C. Opera Sarah Shook Durham Artists Movement Women’s Theatre Festival Culture Mill Previous winners Art’s mandateespecially after HB 2 and Trumpis to change the world not by force, but by enlarging coalitions. After all, art’s effects are limited in scope only when its participants are. When the art world includes enough…
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In Hercules vs. Vampires, a Mythic Hero Embarks on an Operatic Adventure with Bloodsuckers and Other Beasts
HERCULES VS. VAMPIRES Sunday, Oct. 30, 3 p.m., $26–$49 Meymandi Concert Hall, Raleigh Ghouls, monsters, and other creatures abound this time of year, and this weekend, they make their way to Meymandi Concert Hall for N.C. Opera’s adventurous presentation of Hercules vs. Vampires. The company started its 2016–17 season strong in September with Wagner’s Das…
Put a Ring on It: N.C. Opera Takes on Wagner’s Formidable Masterwork
N.C. Opera: Das Rheingold Friday, September 16 & Sunday, September 18, $25–$99 Meymandi Concert Hall, Raleigh Nearly a hundred fifty years after his death, German composer Richard Wagner remains an intimidating force in Western music. His operas are notoriously difficult to stage: he intended for them to represent his grandiose vision of opera as a…
N.C. Opera Presents the Undead, Superheros, the Apocalypse and Creation in Its New Season
Expanding upon an adventurous season that turned heads with its staging of Davis Miller’s boxing opera Approaching Ali, the North Carolina Opera keeps the pedal down in its 2016-17 season, which it announced this week. The eyecatcher on the season is Patrick Morganelli’s Hercules vs. Vampires, an act of sheer Technicolor multimedia madness, coming to…
Live: N.C. Opera breaks Tchaikovsky out of his dense tomb
N.C. Opera: Eugene Onegin Meymandi Concert Hall Sunday, Jan. 24, 2016 We mostly know Tchaikovsky for a handful of symphonic works—ballets, symphonies, concerti and a few overtures thrown in for kicks. Those pieces are so overexposed, so drilled into our collective musical consciousness that it’s hard to approach them with anything near freshness. But the…
Live: Approaching Ali offers emotional attachment
North Carolina Opera’s Approaching Ali Music by D.J. Sparr, libretto by Mark Campbell and Davis Miller Carolina Theatre, Durham Thursday, Jan. 29, 2015 I’ve never connected emotionally with an opera until the North Carolina Opera’s Approaching Ali last week. I’ve had a technical understanding of the emotions before—Mozart’s subtleties mean mischief; Wagner’s power chords mean,…
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