Umsagnir um fyrri framleiðslu
2On Site Opera revived what one hopes will become an annual production of Gian Carlo Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors. In choosing settings for familiar and unfamiliar operas, On Site adds an intriguing dimension to the form. With Amahl, the location in the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen returns the opera to its original meaning. This is a season which celebrates loving kindness as the heart of the human experience.
It’s Monday evening. I find myself again on the deck of the Wavertree tall sailing ship at South Street Seaport. (I wrote an article about the ship in June.) There is, thank you, a slight breeze. Tonight’s audience sits I n well-spaced, wood folding chairs beneath the open sky and a web of rigging. What Lies Beneath is a site-specific performance of five arias, several with potent spoken word, immersing audience in the maritime connection to America’s unconscionable slave trade, and one aria of Captain Ahab’s final moments of reckoning (Melville’s – Moby Dick) representing moral comeuppance. Though the Wavertree was a cargo ship, its atmosphere is much like those vessels that kidnapped Africans who were then sold into slavery. From vignette to vignette, those attending are moved (after a bosun’s whistle) to a new location on deck by quiet, efficient ushers. Geography is well employed to feature vocalists on several levels. Dramatization is entirely fluid.
