The candidates looked more like contestants on Trump’s business reality television program The Apprentice than serious alternative contenders for the highest office in the land.
Following an unfortunate trend in European stage production, Warlikowski reduces Macbeth to a psychiatric diagnosis, with the characters exploring their pathologies in the confines of a mental institution.
Rigoletto has “all the characteristics of a perfect film noir”— seduction, murder, anonymous identities, spooky nocturnal settings, casual violence, unapologetic brutality, and, when done right, some dark humor.
In program interviews, director Marcin Łakomicki and conductor Markus Stenz suggest that Holländer is really about sexism in modern society and a reinforcement of gender roles. A modern European man educated in what passes for the humanities today might think so. But the deeper contexts are ignored.
Under Spain’s Democratic Memory Law, the Francoist nobility was collectively singled out for extirpation, and its heads of family found themselves officially ‘disennobled.’
Tiezzi’s production eschews the interpretive fripperies and psychological baggage common in contemporary Wagner productions in favor of appealing abstractions.
Time may yet tell what Prigozhin was thinking when he launched his insurrection. But he probably did not expect it to end with his flight from the country, the loss of his militia, and extreme personal vulnerability to Putin’s vindictive hand.
