“Fresh Voices” from Goat Hall

Holding our feet to the fire… For the last sixteen years, Goat Hall Productions has hosted the “Fresh Voices Festival,” a celebration of new works written expressly for voice in opera and musical theater. This year, their seventeenth, they displayed pieces by eight composers in performances in Vallejo, Albany and San Francisco. Titled “Feet First Into the Fire,” these works ran a gamut from playful to painful, and each brought a little...

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West Edge finishes its summer opera festival

From fluff to frozen in West Oakland. Experts at reinvention, the West Edge Opera has returned for a summer festival in an industrial wasteland in West Oakland, the abandoned facilities of Pacific Pipe Company.  This resilient opera company, formerly Berkeley Opera, has inhabited a series of venues over the last ten years, most recently at West Oakland’s abandoned train station for two startling and brilliant summers. Dealing with the freedoms and rigors...

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The clang and flash of swords in Marin

The Three Musketeers at Marin Shakespeare All for one, and one for all! The famous motto echoed through the listening trees surrounding the outdoor theater at Dominican University this past weekend, as the Marin...

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