A scene from Hydrogen Jukebox. Photograph by Grant Taylor By Andrew Psarris This weekend, the Eastman community will be treated to one of its annual traditions — the fall opera production in Kilbourn Hall! However, this year the opera is a very un-traditional one: the Philip Glass and Allan Ginsberg masterpiece Hydrogen Jukebox, directed by…
The seismic shifts in America’s cultural and political landscapes are reflected in words and music in Hydrogen Jukebox, a music theatre piece that will be presented by Eastman Opera Theatre November 5 through 8 in the Eastman School of Music’s Kilbourn Hall. Setting the counterculture poems of Allen Ginsberg to the repetitive structures of Philip…
With reluctance, the Voice and Opera Department announces the retirement of Steve Crowley after almost 30 years as Eastman Opera Theatre’s Technical Director/Producer. Steve joined Eastman Opera Theatre in September 1985, working with Richard Pearlman, after a varied career with Trinity Repertory Theater in Providence, Rhode Island, American Place Theater in New York, and other…
Ned Rorem’s Our Town, the opera based on the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Thornton Wilder, opens in Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre tonight and runs through the weekend. Eastman Opera Theatre’s production is the first in upstate New York since the opera’s professional debut at the Lake George Opera in July of 2006. Wilder’s…
We wish a Bonne annee et bonne anniversaire to the French composer Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) – shown above in a drawing by his friend Jean Cocteau. The combination of seriousness, lightheartedness, rich harmonies, and appealing melodies in Poulenc’s music has made it increasingly popular since his death. Here at Eastman we have seen recent performances…
March 22 is the 84th birthday of one of the great American theater composers and lyricists: Stephen Sondheim, who was born in New York City in 1930. Sondheim got his start on Broadway as the lyricist of West Side Story (with Leonard Bernstein, 1957) and Gypsy (with Jule Styne, 1959), and has written many award-winning…