May 2009 – Repeat Performances

May 16, 2009

Smuin Ballet’s Spring Concert at Yerba Buena

Naughty Boy ... It’s spring, and that means love is everywhere for the Smuin Ballet Company. Of the three pieces that make up the spring concert, which opened May 8 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and will move this coming weekend to the Dean Lesher in Walnut Creek, two were choreographed by the company’s late director Michael Smuin. Bouquet and Suite from St. Louis Woman were essential Smuin—romantic, sexy, accessible and entertaining. More...

Categories: dance

May 10, 2009

Pocket Opera Presents Donizetti’s ‘La Favorita’

A pocketful of love and tragedy Donald Pippin’s Pocket Opera has come to the East Bay! It’s recently taken residence in the Julia Morgan Theater, starting in February with La Belle Hélène, the inimitable Offenbach’s own spin on the story of Helen of Troy, and last weekend with Donizetti’s La Favorita. Even more intriguing is the upcoming May 9 production of The Haunted Manor by Polish composer Stanislaw Moniuszko, who is the preeminent...

Categories: opera

May 9, 2009

Lamplighter’s ‘Iolanthe’

Plus ça change, plus ... About the opening night of Iolanthe; or, The Peer and the Peri at the Savoy Theater in London, November 1882, a reviewer wrote: “Neither Mr. Gilbert, as an author, nor Mr. Sullivan, as a musician, write for immortality. The school they have founded may not, perhaps, last far beyond their own time; nor can it be said that their operas are likely to confer any benefit upon the future lyric stage.” One hundred and twenty-seven years...

Categories: opera

May 5, 2009

San Francisco Ballet Presents Balanchine’s ‘Jewels’

Glitter In its second-to-last program of the 2009 season, San Francisco Ballet presented George Balanchine’s three-part Jewels. It’s impossible not to see the selection as an homage to Balanchine’s influence on American dance as well as a restatement of SF Ballet’s deep connection to the choreographer and his New York City company. The three mini-ballets—“Emeralds,” “Rubies” and “Diamonds”—that form the piece were ostensibly inspired by...

Categories: dance

May 2, 2009

Big Love at Marin College

Brides ... Based loosely on Aeschylus’ trilogy on the Danaides, the 50 daughters of Danaus who killed their bridegrooms on their wedding night, the play Big Love, by Charles Mee, examines gender and power-based gender relationships. Full of physicality—both male and...

Categories: theater

‘Tales of Hoffmann’ at Berkeley Opera

The uncanny Hoffmann It’s little wonder that E. T. A. Hoffmann was one of the Romantic era’s favorite and most influential writers—long fantastic stories inspired many of the operas and ballets of the time from Delibes to Tchaikovsky to Offenbach. Recognizing a cultural force when he saw one, Papa Freud used Hoffmann’s work as the basis for his essay on the uncanny, “Das Unheimliche.” Hoffmann’s stories are infused with an air of horror and whimsy,...

Categories: opera