HERO
If the movie The Imitation Game desexualized codebreaking hero Alan Turing, The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing seeks to make his sexuality central to who he was.
Shawn E. Milnes is a native New Yorker who blogs about opera, sex, and movies at Schleppy Nabucco’s. He is currently at work on a memoir.
In Tune
Composer Jake Heggie has turned the classic Christmas movie, about desperate George Bailey and Clarence the angel, into an opera—inspired by his own father’s suicide.
Low Notes
When a man sprinkled ashes of a mentor into the orchestra pit at the Met on Saturday he sparked a terror alert. It's not the first time the cops have had to rush to the opera.
PAST PRESENT
27 tells the story of Stein and Toklas’s relationship, alongside the luminaries they called friends and championed, including Picasso, Matisse, Man Ray, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway.
Fright Night
‘Doomocracy,’ an immersive ‘House of Political Nightmares’ at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, includes rooms devoted to the two candidates, climate change, and gun violence. Fun!
VOICES
Happy Birthday, Wanda June, Vonnegut’s reworking of the myth of Odysseus’s return from the Trojan War, was meant as a commentary on the Vietnam War. Now it will be performed as an opera for the first time.
ONE VOICE
This weekend’s ‘Public Domain’ will bring together 1,000 volunteer singers from around New York City, crowd-sourced from an online campaign, to participate in a choral event whose lyrics originate from online autocomplete searches.
SOUNDS GOOD
If you like your opera to come with a side order of hiking and picnicking, head to the summery delights of Glimmerglass.
HIGH NOTE
Marian Anderson sang a landmark 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial, and blazed a trail for other black classical singers. Now she is being celebrated on U.S. currency.
MOMENT IN TIME
The creators of JFK, a new opera about Jack Kennedy’s assassination, hope that their ‘cosmic’ work brings opera to a new young audience.