http://www.sfreporter.com/articles.sec-22-1-theater-stage-reviews.html Love & Emma Goldman: A Rock Opera is about the enduring human voice. The original production by Sarah-Jane Moody and Jeremy Bleich (aka the experimental pop duo GoGoSnapRadio) is also about taking action for one’s beliefs. It’s about violence, justice, freedom and love. It’s about Emma Goldman, the turn-of-the-century anarchist who spoke up, was deported and disappeared into history.]]> The cast is rehearsing the last scene of Fortunato when I arrive at Teatro Paraguas’ new location, a few units down from its old black-box space in the Agua Fría Village. They’re having trouble finding momentum. Lines are forgotten. Props are dropped. Cues are missed. And the scene comes to a halt when actor Marcos Maez leans against a giant target, only to have it collapse behind him with a rattling crash and the sound of glass breaking.]]> I caused the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This is my conclusion after speaking with Argos MacCallum of Teatro Paraguas about the company’s reading of The Way of Water, Caridad Svich’s play about four people affected by said disaster. ]]> David Olson’s mother and grandmother were poets. At dinner, Olson’s father, a Swedish immigrant, would leave a line of poetry under a dinner plate for Olson or one of his siblings to discover and ]]> Santa Fe’s contemporary music scene awakens from semi-hibernation with two important concerts this week. And they’re all about anniversaries.]]> The Lensic theater space turns 80 this year and simultaneously celebrates 10 years since it became the nonprofit Lensic Performing Arts Center. The Lensic marks this milestone with the same varied arsenal of events it has wielded throughout its history.]]> When audiences hum happily out of The Crosby Theatre after, say, a jolly evening with Albert Herring, or when they linger cheerily outside St. Francis Auditorium after, say, a rousing reading of Mendelssohn’s Octet, their immediate concerns probably aren’t dollars and cents.]]> The music stops, the audience jumps up, claps like mad, bravos crazily, whistles (don’t try this in France) and stomps its collective foot. That’s a standing ovation. That’s what met Yuja Wang as she rose from the piano after her demonic Aug. 17 noon recital.]]> Cagey, brilliant composer-critic Virgil Thomson commented, “Criticism joins the history of its art only when it joins battle, for or against, with the music of its time.” Well, opportunities galore for battling with music of our time popped up in recent programs at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.]]> Ever since the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s first season, those Sunday-evening concerts have been special. Back in 1973, six Sunday-evening programs were it, period, for festivalgoers. As time passed and plans grew, so did the number of concerts. Nowadays, that Sunday program gets a reprise on Monday evening, joined by plenty of other events scattered over the rest of the week.]]> Comic opera hasn’t thrived over the last several dismal decades. Composers prefer to work the dark side. But fast-backward to July 1947 and the premieres of two comic survivors: Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias and Britten’s Albert Herring, which opened July 26 at the Santa Fe Opera.]]> “Chamber music” can be an evasive term. Definitions tend to be slippery. Strict constructionists exclude the solo piano. Goodbye, too, to many of Mozart’s serenades and divertimenti; they’re meant for the outdoors.]]> A touch of glamour opened the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s 38th season at St. Francis Auditorium last week, personified in Susan Graham, the festival’s first artist-in-residence, and Jake Heggie, the hot youngish composer whose operatic ventures have been popular success stories recently.]]> If the Santa Fe Opera ever gets to heaven, and it surely shall, one of the reasons will be its obstinate policy of producing—grandly and expensively—new, challenging, important and sometimes awful operas of our time.]]> If you’re feeling bewitched, bothered and bewildered when you come away from the Santa Fe Opera’s astonishing new production of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, don’t worry—you’re in good company.]]> A lucky 13th on the horizon? That might be Marc Neikrug’s upcoming 13th season as artistic director of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, a role he’s filled since 1998]]> Some wags were calling it Crosby’s curse—that super-colossal opening-night thunderstorm at the Santa Fe Opera.]]> If you hadn’t noticed, “The operas of Strauss and Puccini are false through and through.” This willfully intemperate statement appeared in Joseph Kerman’s must-read Opera as Drama, first published just a year before John Crosby inaugurated the Santa Fe Opera in 1957 with Madame Butterfly.]]> Any interview with the Santa Fe Opera's John Crosby, founder and general director until his retirement in 2000, tended to be an Event. Press shy, Crosby didn't much like playing interviewee. The odd smile might break forth, but the atmosphere remained courteously reserved.]]> Two compelling concerts in eight short days%uFFFDtake note of this really, really big finale to Santa Fe New Music%uFFFDs 2009- 2010 season that%uFFFDs winding up this week. Numero uno: a 4 pm program on June 19 at the New Mexico History Museum%uFFFDs intimate auditorium featuring the music, world premiere included, of Missy Mazzoli.]]>