The Opera Tattler
Reviews of Performances and their Audiences
Category: Public Radio
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* Notes * NPR's Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me! returned to Cal Performances last night. Host Peter Sagal was as entertaining as ever, as was official judge and scorekeeper Carl Kasell. Kasell was particularly cute when he high-fived panelists Tom Bodett, Paula Poundstone, and Mo Rocca. The show ran long, so for 2 hours instead of 90…
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The chief executive of the Royal Opera House Tony Hall recently reviewed youth dance in the UK and dance is to receive £5.5 million from the Departments for Culture, Media and Sport and Children, Schools and Families and Arts Council England. Press Release | BBC Article
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On Super Tuesday I heard a segment on the BBC NewsPod dealing with some controversy over a Spanish musical about Anne Frank. Apparently it took 10 years for the producer, Rafael Alvero, to get the musical off the ground, and the Anne Frank-Fonds still has not granted Alvero rights. Board member Christoph Knoch spoke about…
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Doubtless you have heard that the current Dallas Opera production of Salomé was laughed at last Friday. By coincidence, just after reading The Dallas Morning News article on Salomé, I heard Radiolab's latest show entirely devoted to laughter. Particularly interesting were the segments on Dr. Jaak Panksepp's research on tickling rats and Dr. Robert Provine's…
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* Notes * Yesterday Michael Tilson Thomas conducted San Francisco Symphony in a program of Knussen's Symphony No. 3, Strauss' Vier letzte Lieder, Barber's Andromache's Farewell, and Beethoven's Symphony No. 4. Soprano Deborah Voigt returned to San Francisco Symphony as the soloist for the Strauss and Barber, a performance she will reprise with MTT at Carnegie…
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* Notes * The Irish film Once was released on DVD earlier this week. I saw it a few months ago, and was determined to dislike it, as it was advertised about a thousand times on NPR as being about musicians finding romance on the streets of Dublin. Imagine my surprise to learn Once is…
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Today NPR’s Morning Edition aired a story on Sony and Saawariya, a film based on Dostoevsky’s 1848 "White Nights." Saawariya was released the same weekend as Om Shanti Om, but was panned by critics, including Komal Nahata, the regular reviewer on the BBC Asian Network’s Love Bollywood, who was interviewed for this story. Both Saawariya…
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* Notes * I have this particular friend who has attended every performance with me at Seattle Opera. She is from the Bay Area, so we occasionally go to the opera in San Francisco when she is in town. Last year during the Thanksgiving holiday we spent 7 hours and 25 minutes listening to 3…
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* Notes * NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! was at Cal Performances for two nights on February 8 and 9, 2007. Both performances sold-out. The panelists were Sue Ellicott, Adam Felber, and Paula Poundstone. I attended the second show, which isn’t the regular news quiz, but is on history, and will be aired when…
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