The author would like to thank Adriana da Silva for providing Spanish-language transcription and translation assistance. When Lin-Manuel Miranda hosted Saturday Night Live on October 8, 2016, his opening monologue quickly morphed into an equally personal and political reimagining of “My Shot,” the first solo for founding father Alexander Hamilton, the tenacious titular… Read More
On the evening of August 8, 2008, the Buskirk-Chumley Theater of Bloomington, Indiana, opened its doors for the premiere of ¡Únicamente la verdad! (Only the Truth), the first opera by Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz (b. 1964). The work is a video-opera that was announced as the authentic story of Camelia… Read More
Three days after the July 4th mass shooting in Chicago I woke up to a piece of news on the homepage of the World Journal, the largest Chinese-language newspaper in the United States. An elderly Korean American man in Flushing, Queens, was approached and shoved at a gas station by… Read More
The story has become so familiar it can now write itself: Professor shares racially charged material in class. Some of the most vocal and outraged students testify to their injuries and offer their indictments. Viral stories on conservative websites follow, mourning the death of free speech and the… Read More
By Nicholas StevensIn September 2017, I pasted a link to an interview into an email, and sent it to my former doctoral… Read More
by Nancy Rao In my book Chinatown Opera Theater in North America (University of Illinois Press, 2017), I reconstruct the lost history of a vibrant “Golden Age” of Chinese opera theaters in the United States and Canada in the 1920s,… Read More
By Naomi Graber It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Star Wars saga is inherently Wagnerian (Kalinak, 1992; Schroeder, 2002). Just how Wagnerian is up for debate (Paulin, 2000), but the musical parallels between… Read More
Our post of 6 June 2014 concerned the New York performance of Joseph Rumshinsky’s Di goldene kale (The Golden Bride), a 1923 Yiddish-American operetta. The performance, with piano accompaniment, was based on a score prepared by… Read More
by Laurenz Lütteken This post originally appeared, in German, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of 24 September 2014, in print and digital formats, under the title “Oper der Beliebigkeiten.” We are grateful to Professor Lütteken and the NZZ for permission to publish this adaptation in English, by DKH after… Read More
by Charles T. Downey The Metropolitan Opera and its General Manager, Peter Gelb, took a considerable risk by planning to mount John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer this coming fall. The furor generated by the work’s U.S. premiere in 1991 convinced its librettist, Alice Goodman, that it was… Read More