January 2018 – Repeat Performances

January 23, 2018

San Francisco Ballet’s reawakening of “The Sleeping Beauty”

San Francisco Ballet opened its season last week with performances of the classical masterpiece of Imperial Russian ballet, The Sleeping Beauty. The company, showcasing many of its young principal dancers during the run, which continues to February 7, showed that this quintessential classical ballet still ignites the imagination, presenting a soul-lifting mix of charm and grandeur. The ballet was choreographed by Marius Petipa to Tchaikovsky’s score in 1890, and SF Ballet’s...

Categories: dance

January 19, 2018

Two one-act operas in Alameda

A wintry beauty… In a surprisingly polished pair of performances, Island City Opera, Alameda’s resident opera company, opened two one-act operas by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov last Friday, Jan. 19. While known for his powerful use of orchestral color and deep sympathy for native Russian folk themes, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote these two operas in very different styles. Mozart and Salieri, composed to a libretto by Alexander Pushkin, offered the idea that the composer Salieri...

Categories: opera

January 18, 2018

“Harriet’s Spirit” rises in young voices

Once again Opera Parallèle, that unique and valuable company founded and directed by Artistic Director and Conductor Nicole Paiement and Creative Director Brian Staffenbiel, showed us the relevance of opera to contemporary life. Not through reworkings of traditional opera but through the active writing and producing of new opera. For several years, Opera Parallèle has developed an educational program that offers multiple opportunities for school children – from attending rehearsals to...

Categories: opera

January 17, 2018

Carey Perloff’s farewell: Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party”

In response to a description of the landlady at the house where I was renting a room in Exeter in the southwest of England, an English friend told me, “We have a tradition of eccentric landladies.” The landlady in The Lavender Hill Mob flashed into my mind, though she didn’t have a lot in common with my landlady. Even so... In Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, which opened last week in an A.C.T. production at The Geary Theater in San Francisco, the odd landlady...

Categories: theater