Review: Taking Up Serpents by Chicago Opera Theater chicagotribune.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from chicagotribune.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Alabama snake handlers focus of new Chicago opera
Updated Mar 01, 2021;
By Chris Jones Chicago Tribune (TNS) and Tribune Media Services I can tell you that when we see an art form like opera taking on a story like this, we get real worried – are we about.Posted by Chicago Opera Theater on Sunday, February 28, 2021
“God gets in the cracks” is the most common lyrical reprise in “Taking Up Serpents,” an intense, 70-minute contemporary chamber opera set among the Pentecostals of southern Alabama, here a community with a dangerous predilection for live snakes.
It’s a cleverly ambivalent resurgent phrase in Jerre Dye’s staccato libretto, worrying as it does over whether the deity’s slippery presence implies judgement or healing.
7 pm ET: Lawrence Brownlee presents
The Sitdown with LB. The tenor’s Facebook Live series returns with an unfiltered and honest look inside the opera industry. This week: Management, featuring Matthew Horner (IMG Artists) and Alex Fletcher (Fletcher Artist Management). View here. LIVE 7:30 pm ET: Met Opera Streams presents Donizetti’s
Don Pasquale. Starring Beverly Sills, Alfredo Kraus, Håkan Hagegård, and Gabriel Bacquier, conducted by Nicola Rescigno. Production by John Dexter. From January 11, 1979. View here and for 24 hours.
7:30 pm ET: SalonEra presents
Jewish Diaspora. Recorder virtuoso Daphna Mor explores Sephardic song and Jewish liturgical poetry while viola da gamba player Elizabeth Weinfield highlights the contributions of 17th-century converso composer Leonora Duarte. Additional guests to be announced. View here.
Melisa Tien s SWELL to Premiere Online at HERE
Created by 26 artist-collaborators, Swell weaves together ten original, new music compositions by ten composers.by BWW News Desk
Playwright, lyricist, and librettist Melisa Tien is the creator and producer of the upcoming live, online song cycle Swell, presented by HERE from March 17-21, 2021. This contemporary work about immigrants and children of immigrants, written by immigrants and children of immigrants, is directed by Elena Araoz with music direction by Tian Hui Ng. Right now, the U.S. feels like it s on the brink of so many things - politically, economically, socially. Immigrant stories, especially ones that humanize the people they re about, help highlight those who are often left behind when, for example, a medical disaster happens. Swell reminds us these are real people, simply trying to make their way, like everyone else, Melisa said of the piece s subject and timeliness.
Imagine you are a young singer, hoping for a career in opera and you ve worked hard enough, been good enough and had enough stamina to reach the finalist stage of a competition where you ll be performing before a theater jammed with opera lovers.
But now instead of facing a live audience at your big moment, you are instead greeted with facsimiles of people: 2D cardboard cutouts filling the seats as you sing two arias in the course of the evening before a panel of judges. The rewards are still the same recognition, prize money, possible accepted into a respected training program but the ambience, well it ll be a bit different.